Consistency

The whole Gnome 3 / Unity thing has got me wondering if we're losing something we used to tout as a feature, a reason to free users from Windows; the freedom to change at your own pace and not have to retrain every time. When Gnome 2 becomes end of life, every distro will have to choose a new path. This post is aimed more at small companies, charities etc rather than home users but the principle does still apply. Lets step back a few years and put in a hypothetical example.

You're a FOSS user and advocate, your day to day activities puts you in the path of a small company or charity who currently have an all Microsoft setup but don't use anything other than the basics. They'd be perfectly suited to Linux desktops, with Open Office, Firefox etc. You put on your advocacy hat and start educating them on this Linux thing they've never heard of, pointing out that it's secure, stable, free (including free of charge) and that the retraining would only need doing once at the start, from then on they can keep their desktops as they want. Nobody is going to force them to change by making a project end of life.

Taking the sensible route, you point them towards Ubuntu, a distro that has the most momentum in the Linux world. Whether you like or use Ubuntu yourself it's the logical choice, since every Linux application has a deb for Ubuntu, or a tutorial for installing on Ubuntu. The same can't be said about other distros. You also extoll the virtues of the LTS version of Ubuntu because organizations want to get on with what they do, not have downtime once per year to upgrade when stuff works fine as it is.

Keep in mind that most companies are staffed by people who have no interest in computing. Their PC is simply a tool to do their work. They want as little hassle as possible to do it. Change has to be valid, thought through and worth the time and hassle involved.

So the organization decide they like the sound of Linux and make the arrangements to start switching over to it at the next IT refresh. After some initial teething problems and staff confusion it's going good. Now we skip back to now and find that the Gnome 2 set up that you sold them on as "being in their hands" is coming to the end of it's life, that Ubuntu is switching to Unity, and that Gnome itself is switching to Gnome 3. Granted Ubuntu 11.04 is Unity by default with Classic Ubuntu as an option, but we're talking LTS here, the next LTS is 11.10 which won't have that option, it's just Unity. Within one cycle the promise of "it's in your hands" is torn to shreds. It must make them wonder about the other statements you made when advocating Linux, such as "is it illegal"?

I've long stated that if Windows XP was open sourced Vista and Windows 7 licenses would never have sold. In the open source world nothing is dead while there are people willing to use and maintain it. I like both Unity and Gnome 3 but I see a lot of people who don't. Canonical are gambling that they will have a net gain of users by switching to Unity, that most of the people complaining either weren't Ubuntu users, or are bluffing about leaving Ubuntu because of Unity.

KDE went through a tough couple of years with the change from 3.5 to 4.x to the point where it's now very slick, very functional and still looks like a traditional desktop. While home users are moving more and more to portable devices where a tablet UI works, working environments will still rely on desktops and laptops for a long time to come.

It'd be a very smart move for Canonical to take over development of Gnome 2 and set that as their default DE, while using Unity for small screen or touch screen devices, or at the very least make a commitment to ship every Ubuntu release with the dual option like 11.04. Instead of hemorrhaging users they'd be buckling under the weight of new users in addition to keeping the ones they have.