New default layout in Ubuntu MATE 18.04

Development Discussion
9

When your objectives include the words:

Recreate the halcyon days of Ubuntu for users who prefer a traditional desktop metaphor.

this leaves a certain expectation in those users who do prefer that traditional desktop metaphor. There's a reason why we flocked to this distribution in the first place. You were one of the few that actually offered the traditional desktop we were used to and had come to love. It wasn't Ubuntu's TV distro that made it famous, nor its Android on Linux moonshots, or its phone convergence--it was a desktop that worked intuitively and looked good in all the right places. It was its Gnome 2.x that they did better than everyone else that made Ubuntu.

Now you're trying to change that. Despite having done a poll and been told that most of us do not want. Despite having lied about this being only "experimental" in test builds and not actually planned to be forced as the _emphasized text_new default when we again said we did not want that.

Defaults matter. Every distro other than this one has given me fits when I tried to change the default stupid Windows knock off menus or panels by breaking, often in strange ways that defy description.

You say compiz is in the repos? I wonder why so many threads about it were necessary then...

Funny how all those people could have just installed the files from the repos and didn't for some reason...

Hey it's your distro. You're absolutely free to do what you want. You want to lead the parade, have at it---just be sure that where you're leading there are people following.

With how vocal many of us have been on this I would be surprised if the change doesn't have consequences once things start breaking and who knows? Maybe you'll be the first to get it right and you'll have your cake and be able to eat it too. There's always a first time.

I sincerely hope to be proven wrong when the release of 18.04 LTS comes out and continue to be proven wrong as the releases after that come out. I don't expect that I will be on this--but I sincerely hope I am. I like this distro, I like this desktop--for the most part it's just worked for me so I want it to continue doing so.

Please let me be wrong!

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