Whatever one thinks of unity, taking away the ability to keep the old desktop environment seems extremely misguided. One of the best things about open source is the knowledge that once you get a working setup, you'll always be able to keep it.
I'll soon be returning to using a linux box as my primary machine after a year stuck on laptop-only. I'll give Ubuntu a first shot out of loyalty, but if my experience is anything like this guy's, it'll be back to Debian for me...
One of the best things about open source is the knowledge that once you get a working setup, you'll always be able to keep it.
You can keep it – no-one’s forcing you to upgrade. Or are you saying that every open source project should keep every option and setup it’s ever had ad infinitum?
Security fixes are back-ported regularly for Ubuntu releases and if you are really concerned then use the LTS version that will have 3 years of support.
Which, as I said, would be at least another year away.
My response was to you bringing up the topic of security so I simply addressed that with details of Ubuntus LTS. Other than that there would be no reason to upgrade however even then you could update any software package found to have security issues on an individual basis through PPA, debs or source. That is the flexibility of opensource.
No operating system can be supported forever but funnily enough Ubuntu have just announced an extension to 5 years for 12.04 LTS.
+1 on wanting to keep the old desktop environment.
I've been an Ubuntu user since 7.04. One of the biggest benefits was that the desktop environment stayed pretty consistent throughout the years. I always enjoyed upgrading b/c I got the benefit of bug fixes, performance improvements, and better hardware compatibility, but w/out having to re-learn a new environment. Enter Unity, and now I'm forced to either learn it, or jump to another distro.
Or configure a different interface for yourself, e.g. gnome or xfce. I can't stand Unity either, but I just don't use it. It would have been nice if the default interface was more usable by power users/developers, but I can see why they made Unity simple. We are not the target audience.
EDIT: And yes, I know that it is harder to get a "normal" gnome interface in 11.10. That's why I haven't upgraded myself yet. But I will, and I'll see what others have done to get around Unity. I just can't see it as the "end" of Ubuntu. Maybe some of us power users will go back to Debian, or to Xubuntu, etc. Maybe we'll lead an exodus to a new distro, but I think more likely Ubuntu will stay at the leading edge of the "user-friendly" Linux distributions for a while.
I'll soon be returning to using a linux box as my primary machine after a year stuck on laptop-only. I'll give Ubuntu a first shot out of loyalty, but if my experience is anything like this guy's, it'll be back to Debian for me...