The problem is that Ubuntu is not focusing on the fundamentals and they're not putting enough money into testing.
I think you made my point more succinctly than I did.
I think the UX was just fine in last year's Ubuntu. You could argue about whether Gnome 2.x was as slick as Windows 7 or OS X (I think it was at least better than Windows), but I don't think there's much doubt the system was usable by non-geeks. The first thing to break for me was suspend/resume, with one of 10.10's kernel updates. I reverted to an older kernel and hoped 11.04 would fix the problem. It didn't, and it precluded running the older, working kernel. Performance also got worse, and I can't think of any noteworthy improvements as I didn't consider Unity ready for prime time.
So then 11.10 came out. Reviews said Unity was great now and everything ran smoothly, so I pulled the trigger on the upgrade. Unity did, in fact mostly work, though it was slow and glitchy. Oh well, back to Gnome Classic. Of course, it's Gnome 3 now and I can't even move the clock. That won't do, but I've heard the new Gnome 3 gnome-shell is awesome, and I have a video card that can handle it. It loads, slowly, but UI components sometimes vanish when I try to interact with them. Eventually, X crashes. Oh well, that gives me an opportunity to see what progress KDE 4 has made. I can report that the error messages for Plasma crashing look like they've had some attention from a designer since the last time I saw them. Good work.
I'm running Linux Mint Debian Edition with Xfce now. Still no suspend/resume, but everything else works. The Linux desktop experience is almost back to where it was two years ago. Yay leadership!
So the good news is you can move the clock in Gnome 3 Classic. All you have to do is hold Alt to right click on the widget and move. I mean... that's completely obvious right?
This has to be one of the worst UI decisions I've ever encountered...
I think you made my point more succinctly than I did.
I think the UX was just fine in last year's Ubuntu. You could argue about whether Gnome 2.x was as slick as Windows 7 or OS X (I think it was at least better than Windows), but I don't think there's much doubt the system was usable by non-geeks. The first thing to break for me was suspend/resume, with one of 10.10's kernel updates. I reverted to an older kernel and hoped 11.04 would fix the problem. It didn't, and it precluded running the older, working kernel. Performance also got worse, and I can't think of any noteworthy improvements as I didn't consider Unity ready for prime time.
So then 11.10 came out. Reviews said Unity was great now and everything ran smoothly, so I pulled the trigger on the upgrade. Unity did, in fact mostly work, though it was slow and glitchy. Oh well, back to Gnome Classic. Of course, it's Gnome 3 now and I can't even move the clock. That won't do, but I've heard the new Gnome 3 gnome-shell is awesome, and I have a video card that can handle it. It loads, slowly, but UI components sometimes vanish when I try to interact with them. Eventually, X crashes. Oh well, that gives me an opportunity to see what progress KDE 4 has made. I can report that the error messages for Plasma crashing look like they've had some attention from a designer since the last time I saw them. Good work.
I'm running Linux Mint Debian Edition with Xfce now. Still no suspend/resume, but everything else works. The Linux desktop experience is almost back to where it was two years ago. Yay leadership!