unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
> example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
> cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
> in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
> specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
> blog whose name you didn't even know until now..."
> 
> 2) Making easy to revert to the original behavior, at least until
> *full* feature-parity is reached. I'm not talking about a GUI, but
> recompilation should not be required. The main example of how this
> is currently lacking is Empathy. If the user does not like NotifyOSD,
> he can install notification-daemon. But if he does that, the heavily
> patched Ubuntu version of Empathy becomes broken. And because the end
> user has no obligation of knowing what came from Ubuntu patches, who
> also ends up suffering is upstream bug triagers, who have to deal with
> a lot of misdirected reports. This is creating a lot of bad blood and
> earning Ubuntu a very bad reputation among both upstream developers
> and end users.

In short: in think Ubuntu *can* and *should* dare to go to certain
directions even if it conflicts with everyone else, even if just for
the sake of experimenting. But conflicting should mean *offering an
option* and not trampling over upstream and forcing things on users.

Also, it should be made more clear that Ubuntu developers support
and encourage support for other applications, but just cannot work
on everything due to lack of manpower. Today, the Messaging Menu
is hated among 11 out of 10 Thunderbird users for obvious reasons.