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Comment by tedks | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about bazaar and Unity? Or how Canonical is able to "force" a vcs on its userbase?

I've used Unity since it was released, never had any issues, and generally think it's the best GNU/Linux window shell around.

Bazaar is also ridiculously simple, and I've started using it as a front-end to every other vcs. The support for git is a little rough, but I can do in one command what git users have to do in four, so I deal with it.

I think that the vocal minority of Ubuntu power-users (which is sort of a laughable term) hates change. This is what made Unity such a "failure" when really it's a pretty great system.

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Launchpad supports Bazaar only. That's one of the "top ten reasons" to switch to Bazaar according to the docs [1].

That said, I don't really think Canonical is "forcing" anyone besides playing the "defaults" card in the distribution they control, and even then you can simply not use the stuff is installed by default (although I think that making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use is a little bit against the bazaar philosophy of Linux distributions).

[1] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b...

EDIT: formatting

Launchpad, like Github, is offering a service and that too free. It is not a valid argument. It would be like asking Github why don't they support other VCS.

> making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use

Examples please.

But github does support other VCS!

Really? Link please

https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

Supporting parts of subversion client is not same as subversion repository.

I don't know if it is a valid argument or not, but according to Bazaar docs it's one of Bazaar's strong points.

AFAIK the official Lanuchpad FAQ says Bazaar is the best VCS for the project:

https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+faq/37

And apparently they can (or want to) support only one. Fair enough.

I don't know if this constitutes a "power user" usage pattern, but watching a colleague try to work with Unity with dual monitors was hugely amusing.

I'm curious to know what you can do in one command in bazaar that you need 4 in git to do.

Here's my power user setup for dual monitors with Unity:

1. Plug in dual monitor to HDMI port. 2. Use Unity.

What did your colleague have trouble with?

(Four might have been slight hyperbole, but git is a usability nightmare. I forget what exact task I can do in one command that it takes 3-4 to do in git, there's probably some set of absurd arguments to do it in fewer, but I don't know them and am not willing to spend hours reading tutorials to discover what magic buttons I have to press to get git to do what I want.)

> What did your colleague have trouble with?

I remember him trying to move a window to the other monitor and having bounce back repeatedly. Very funny to watch.

> git is a usability nightmare.

No argument here. The design of the commandline UI is terrible ("git checkout" is the first offender you're likely to meet). However, it's powerful enough that I'm using all the time, occasionally bridging with SVN when needed. Once you get hooked on cheap local branching, you can never give up.

Eh, Bazaar has cheap local branching as far as I care about. And yes, I don't have to deal with git checkout.

Window management can be funny -- I think there's a bug in compiz where a display will "reject" windows if they're too large (when minimized) for the display. This causes the drag-to-top motion to hit the display the window is currently on, and so it goes back to the original display. Using control-alt-numpad5 works, as does unmaximizing your windows and making them smaller than your smallest display.

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