There has been a lot of hate from the existing Linux user base towards Unity. I would like to share with you a story which clearly illustrates that Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu team have made the right move in not only biting the bullet and going with Unity and the various other changes made in recent releases but the timing at which these changes where rolled out also.
The daughter of one of my colleagues recently started working with us on a short term basis for work experience. She was tasked with cloning a Windows instal from one device to various drives using a drive caddy. What seemed a simple and straight forward task proved far more difficult than expected. The devices where netbooks and Windows 7 seems to verify the disk UUID of the new host machine's disk against the one of the install on the drive. This led to a non-booting install and the purchase purchase of various commercial third party tools and eventually, a successful clone via (the rather pricey for what it is) Norton Ghost. But to get to this point in what should have been a fairly straight forward task took two the team leader for software development, on of the IT heads and myself. The cause for the headache was Windows and its extremely confusing clatter of tools and sub tools that do practically the same thing and don't even do that job well. When you start to expose your average end user such as the person who was tasked with the job initially to the more advanced in and outs of windows the whole thing starts to unravel at the seems and that person never looks at windows the same way again, they see it for what it is.
"I NOW OFFICALLY HATE WINDOWS!" she exclaimed as the cloning procedure finally completed. "Even on my laptop at home i can't stand it any more since starting this stuff.". A slight smirk crept onto my face. This was one of those rare, lucid moments in which a Windows user realizes that the devil you know, is still the devil, one which i felt was my duty to take advantage of . "There are alternatives to Windows you know?" I said calmly reclining in my chair, "Yeah? What do you mean?" she replied. A vague look of recognition washed over her face as i utter a single two syllable word, "Linux". I proceeded to open up a new VM on my Macbook and boot up my Ubuntu 11.04 install. "Thats it? Wow, it really looks nice" she said as Unity opened up. I began to show her the Software center, multiple desktops, the Unity bar auto-hiding, sound menu applet (she was partially taken with this.) and app pinning in the Unity dock, all of which she was suitably impressed by. "I think ill install this!". This a very gratify sentence to hear if you are showing someone what is in your mind a better way to compute. "Is it free??" she asked with a slight grimace on her face expecting my answer to be a solid no" I proved my point by going on to the downloads section and showing her where it was available to download from. "Is there any way i can keep, Windows (which happened to be vista, no wonder she's at her wits end with Windows!) and have this too? Just for my iPod" to which i replied, my smirk becoming a grin, "sure is!" i exclaimed. While i do understand why she would want this, i find my iPod touch works perfectly with Linux however.
After half an hour and a bit of Unetbootin magic i had a Live Ubuntu 11.04 USB key which i preceded to boot up and explain the install process process with. I pointed to the "Install along side windows" option and left her with the Unity desktop to play around with, happy that a good days work had been done.
One thing that was very evident from it all was that thanks to the combination of Unity, Ubiquity and Wubi, Ubuntu is now well positioned to expand their market share and gain new users in a way that has not been possible with any Linux distribution until now. Each release is not without its troubles but with each release comes a new level of ease of usability along side even more polish. There is nothing that the current desktop can't do that it could do two or more releases back, before unity, the changes made make things easier and if these changes make it possible for Windows user to jump aboard the Linux express with ease then die hard Linux aficionados need to deal with that. This is not just a big win for Unity but a big win for both Ubuntu and linux as a whole. THIS is progress, it needed to happen.
P.S @Microsoft, maybe its time to do a bit of extreme UI simplification yourselves. I can easily use DD in Linux to do my disk cloning, Carbon copy (which as a very pretty front end) on Mac OS. Why does the OS which has the highest market share at almost 90 percent of the Pie, require a PhD in computer science to clone successfully?
Patrick Quinn.
