As am I. That was my entire point. Allow people to make choices. Just keep the defaults sane, which to me means the ‘Traditional’ layout.
See, I don’t care if anyone prefers their set up to remind them of Windows or not. I don’t prefer it obviously but so long as it’s not a default I don’t care what you or anyone else changes their interface to. What I want is to keep the Mate desktop looking like it did in terms of interface.
The reason is that pretty much every desktop is doing some variation on the Redmond interface. If we become a part of that crowd how are we able to differentiate ourselves by appearance? Don’t we just disappear?
So while I think there are some things we can do to dress up the system I think retaining the traditional interface ought to be our bread and butter. Improve the overall desktop, design, themes and colors, sure! But keep the thing that makes us unique front and center. Don’t throw that away to become just another bad Windows or OSX knock off. Because even if you make a perfect copy sooner or later something is going to break the illusion when it doesn’t work the same way those interfaces do.
Personally I always thought Gnome 2.x represented the best parts of both those desktops but in a representation that was it’s own. Ubuntu’s version of that was always the one I thought worked the best and showed the most refinement. I’d like to see more of that kind of thinking with Ubuntu-Mate. Make our version have the least amount of papercuts possible. That was one of Shuttleworth’s better ideas, to focus on eliminating those.
Beautiful but functional. Personally I think we’re pretty close already.