Ubuntu Narwhal just a creature with a horn attached?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="369" caption="Designed by Committee"][/caption]

Frankly the introduction of the misnamed Unity into the mainstream Ubuntu distro default desktop is yet another distraction from productivity. "Are my buttons on the right, no they on the left side" issue which results from the well-known duck-billed platpus school of design, yep, the Narwhal is also one of nature's creatures which looks like it got designed by a commitee. Instead of tackling some of the basic infrastructure problems that affect Ubuntu Linux in several important desktop areas, (see below) the community appears to be caught up with the need to present desktop eye candy that does absolutely nothing for productivity.

In the process we lose the desktop while gaining what is essentially yet another widget shell interface. Superstructure sheen, superficial glitz. Totally unnessary in terms of development IMHO. Hopefully Gnome will get its act together and we will all figure out a way to keep Classic Gnome on our desktops instead of having Unity foisted on us, replacing the default Ubuntu-Desktop session with the next upgrade.

Surely it is a question of choice? Will there be freedom in our package-kit, or will update-manager simply kill our default ubuntu-sessions, forcing us to use the NextStep-centric dock?

I was looking forward to Wayland, since at least there is the possibility of near perfect resolution,  but this is unlikely to be included in Narwhal or the near future, so there really is not much progress happening in Ubuntu apart from the  introduction of an alternative to the Gnome Shell which we already have. Mind you, since we can already install Unity, are we going to see the rise of Unity variants? Vote for freedom, Unity really needs to be an optional extra, like Gnome Shell. Something we can install or remove at leisure, otherwise, I'm afraid, Ubuntu Linux is going to be replaced by Linux Mint as people's distro of choice, at least having a peppermint flavoured varient isn't all that bad, you can simply change appearance.

Here are some of my current Ubuntu gripes

basic desktop networking

Try configuring Samba, a piece of software that is so huge and complicated it deserves to have a distro all of its own. The NFS kernel server may not be any easier, but at least it works.

desktop audio and video production

While the lack of any killer apps in this department hasn't stopped Linux fans from coming up with their own, Jack is seriously old. It is one of my pet infrastructure hates, relying on an applications that is not actually supported by the distro in order to open any one of the many Linux audio tools.

drag 'n drop extensibility

Try dragging files from one application to the next. Or pasting an audio clip into your favourite email programme. Do we still have to think about this one?

productive media folders

Over the past few distros, we've seen the addition of one or two extra  folders in the default home folder. I would have thought making home folders more media friendly would have been a focus, but no, we still have to install tools like Gloobus previews. Media folders like Music and Video have absolutely no intelligence other than the fact they are folders to which some apps like Banshee may relate, then again, why bulk up with Banshee, a relative whale of a programme.

In short, stop tackling superstructure, because what we really need is integrated infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure integrated...............,

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Unnecessary addition of unicorn horn?"][/caption]