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Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them".

It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced. Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking about it for, what, 3 years now? Move on, one way or another.

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People complain about Unity and Gnome3 because they don't offer workflows that work well for desktops. The Linux community is open to change and new ideas, but when the majority of users are unhappy with something for such a long time then something is clearly wrong.

Gnome 3 works pretty well on my desktop. But I use the keyboard for navigation a lot.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion. At my company we use Mint Mate on all desktops. It's clean, simple, works great, and doesn't require training for employees who have never used Linux.

Why Mate instead of a modern, extendable DE such as GNOME 3?

How is MATE not a modern and extendable DE?

Also, the assertion that GNOME 3 is extendable is funny. It's probably the least so out of the major GNU/Linux DEs, as the developers have been hellbent on pursuing "brand coherency" as of late, and in general dissuading from tampering with defaults.

Or elementary? http://elementaryos.org/

Because typical office workers who learned how to use Gnome2 need retraining to use Gnome3.

Training cost. It is that simple. Same reason a lot (not all) companies are 'downgrading' PCs with Windows 8 back to Windows 7.

Have you ever pushed a major application re-design out to 'normal' users?

Disclaimer: personally, I quite like Gnome Shell running on top of the Gnome 3 libraries and gdm3.

How much training does it actually take to learn the GNOME 3 interface though? I use to train people at a call center how to use an old terminal based DOS application to fill out orders for sausage in 3 8-hour days. But gnome 3 is a lot more simple. Surely 8 hours is enough to teach about work spaces and how to press the windows key?

It's funny you almost never hear about companies having to train staff to use a company smartphone. I guess all smart phone interfaces are pretty similar though.

Concentric circles or ripples in a pond...

Mod4+Type and get the browser working

Then the names of the programs (and how to find applications in the activity view). Many people navigate by position in menu.

Then the change in Alt-Tab/Alt-` behaviour (could be fun) and the new workspaces (not many use those)

Then just being around when odd combinations of old workflow and new one happen. Minimising a window and forgetting the application is running. Nothing to click on to get windows back &c

I'm not defending anything here, just answering the original question.

Right, it's like when those Unix luddites refused to upgrade to OS/2 or even DOS. Wake up, people! It's called progress!

If you go back and read early Daring Fireball posts you will find him complaining loudly about various parts of OS X not being as good as OS 9, and it very much was forced on them.

This is the same writer that makes a point of mocking pundits who assail Apple with poor advice that would be catastrophic if followed.

There are tons of people who still bitch and moan about how OSX 10.6 was the pinnacle of OSX, and that's been going on nearly 5 years. I've seen plenty of people try to make Win8 look like XP too. There's a good percentage of people who simply do not like change.

There is a difference between disliking change (ludditism) and not wanting to have one's options removed involuntarily. There's no reason at all to enjoy change for the worse -- if a new DE no longer supports one's highly efficient workflow, and doesn't provide an equally efficient alternative, it is a change for the worse.

Then why don't we start architecting computer systems that respect many peoples aversion to large abrupt change, and allow them to gradually adopt new features? Instead we do these sporadic and massive code-drops that are jarring to a large segment of our users. And then we blame our users for being disgruntled.

As developers we would never accept this from the kernel, and we would complain about how it was forcing us to do massive changes to our code. Yet, we think nothing of doing this to those who have come to rely on our code.

We need a better methodology and economic model. This may well be one of the hidden benefits of SAAS where slow incremental changes fit in more easily.

I absolutely agree with you and, in fact, I'm a user of Unity who doesn't hate it and has moved on from Gnome (which I didn't hate either). Sure there's stuff I don't like about Unity, but no deal breakers.

That said, it's wonderful that Free and Open Source software has a place for conservative diehards, even if I'm not one of them.

PS: disclaimer: I was a user of KDE from the good old days who abandoned ship when KDE 4 got weird :)

I don't know about the quality of the architecture and code, but from a desktop user's perspective I find Unity worse than Gnome2.

What about people with old computers?

They should probably not upgrade from OS9 to OSX or maybe not upgrade from Leopard to Yosemite. Depends on what is supported and how it runs.

That's rediculous. You're recommending that people stick with old versions that are riddled with known vulnerabilities. There are some great lightweight modern OS's, like CrunchBang and Lubuntu that work well on old hardware.

I think you're missing the point. It's common practice to sunset something. Apple, Google, Microsoft do it all the time. The fact is the support for some version of OSX has been deprecated and not supported any more. What are those folk to do?

Ubuntu 12.04, which has a version of Gnome classic, is still supported until 2017 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases). If someone is running hardware past this date, well, they are going to be on their own. That's life. That's software.

Just to be clear: you think it's preferable that people using old hardware should run old Ubuntu-with-Gnome and accept their known security holes, than that they should use still-supported, modern OSes designed to run on old hardware? Did CrunchBang run over your dog?

Mate seems to be under active development. They're currently adding support for Wayland and GTK3 for the next release [1]. It's not like they're just repackaging GNOME 2.32 for the latest distributions.

[1] http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/roadmap

Progress, in general, implies some sort of improvement. Unity is not necessarily an improvement or regression from GNOME 2, it simply is.

Also keep in mind that, architecturally, Unity is a replacement for the GNOME Shell, but is still heavily tied to the rest of the GNOME userland.

Actually, I rather like Unity. However in versions later than 12.04 it breaks LibreOffice mnemonics (Alt-F-A for Save File As... and Alt-I-O-F for Insert Formula) which happens to be 80% of my work-flow.

I gather it is something to do with the way the global menu software works.

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