General Disillusionment with Ubuntu

There's always been murmurs of discontent in the Linux community with Canonical, the company that sponsors and manages Ubuntu. Before, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about; it was the easy-to-use distribution and it seemed to work quite well. Having watched Ubuntu's development over the last year, I can now see why.
A large part of this is just that users are jealous that Ubuntu, and not their favorite distribution, is seeing so much success. I'm not going to go into this, because it'll likely degenerate into a flame-war.
However, the two more well-supported criticisms regard Canonical's heavy-handedness with regard to Ubuntu as well as its tendency to release new versions just to meet a release date even if the associated programs aren't exactly production-quality.
There are a couple examples of the first occur. Canonical wants to further develop the Ubuntu Software Center into a combination of APT and Apple's iOS App Store in terms of functionality. However, this combination may be going too far, as Canonical is also planning to review all application submissions similar to how Apple does this. That discomforts me as well as a lot of other users, and if this does become a reality, I'm glad to continue Linux Mint (and it may be all the more reason to switch to the Debian-based version, which is something I can say for most everything I will talk about in the rest of this post).
Canonical created a firestorm of controversy before the version 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" release with its decision to move the window control buttons to the left of the titlebar, à la Mac OS X. The criticisms were one (or more) of the following: Ubuntu was becoming a clone of Mac OS X, the control placement was unintuitive, or there was no need to change something that worked (and still works). In one reply in a particular Ubuntu mailing list, Mark Shuttleworth basically dissed the whole community (which is something I covered in a much earlier post).
There are a couple examples of the second issue. In version 9.10 "Karmic Koala", Ubuntu released Empathy (though this could have been to spur further development and refinement) and XSplash, neither of which were production-ready at that time (and XSplash disappeared after version 9.10 anyway). The most recent example of this is Ubuntu's newly announced proposal to replace GNOME Shell/Metacity/Mutter with the Unity interface even on desktops. (Unity was released in version 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" as the new netbook interface, so I'm not really sure how it'll scale up as a DE for a full-blown desktop.) The most common criticisms of this is that Unity has only been included in one release so far, and that it is very slow, buggy, and rigid (as in not customizable especially when compared to standard GNOME). Yet, Canonical is so eager to push ahead with Unity that it wants to make it an environment for the common desktop as well.
I'm not going to say anything about Unity for myself because I haven't tried it (and it will likely not happen). What I will say is that it isn't surprising to me that more and more distributions today are switching from an Ubuntu base to a Debian base, because Debian is entirely community-driven and is usually more stable. That's why my Fresh OS respins are based off of Linux Mint "Debian", that's why #! moved to a Debian base, and that's why Manhattan OS (which was based on Ubuntu not too long ago) moved to a Debian testing base (along with rebranding itself to Jupiter OS). Folks, expect to see a lot more of these types of base shifts happening in the near future, as Ubuntu starts to really chart its own course.

GNOME 3, Activites, and KDE 4

There have been a slew of new articles detailing the progress of work on GNOME 3, and the refrain in all of them has been that "GNOME 3 will revolutionize the desktop". The focus on GNOME 3, ever since the release of the first mock-ups, has been on the new GNOME Shell and GNOME Activities (which are really just two sides of the same coin). The thing is, GNOME Activities has essentially the same concept (and even the same name) as KDE 4 Activities. So I was thinking for quite a while: how can this be called "revolutionary" with a straight face? Today it hit me: while KDE may have had the idea first, GNOME presents a far superior execution of this idea; GNOME Activities in the alpha and beta versions of GNOME 3 was very usable and improved with each iteration, while KDE Activities remained very slow, very buggy, and nearly unusable until the release of KDE 4.5.
All this makes me rethink my previous position on GNOME 3. I previously believed that GNOME 3 would suffer the same fate as KDE 4, in that a lot of current GNOME users would migrate to other DEs upon seeing GNOME 3 (be it for its radical nature or its buggy nature). Now, however, I don't think this is the case. I think the major *nix DEs are finally falling into fairly well-defined niches. GNOME will emphasize simplicity, ease-of-use, and understated modernity over flashiness and over-the-top effects. KDE will be the way forward for ultimate customization, web-connected computing through Plasmoid widgets, and flashy desktop effects (as well as tools for power-users, like Dolphin/Konqueror vs. Nautilus, Okular vs. Evince, Kate vs. Gedit, etc.). (Xfce and LXDE will, of course, remain the DEs of choice for people who need lower-resource but still fully-functional and modern DEs.)
But with GNOME moving towards a more tightly-integrated and powerful Metacity WM, one WM is still left out in all this: Compiz. Unfortunately, Compiz and its desktop effects still don't work in recent builds of GNOME 3. While Compiz integration with KDE has gotten better, it still isn't seamless, and Kwin is almost there (but not quite). While most everyday Linux users don't use most Compiz effects (except maybe window decoration transparency and minimize/maximize effects), these effects often play a role in convincing non-Linux users to try Linux. There have been stories after stories of people just using their Linux computers with their friends and their friends being awed and intrigued by the desktop cube and the wobbly windows; don't underestimate the power of these effects to convince people (in the implicit form of "can your OS do this?"). So what does all this mean? It'll become a lot harder to convince people to use Linux through this route, as there will be many people put off by the confusing and endless customization options of KDE 4 (or simply can't run it because they have lower-end hardware). So, GNOME 3 developers, can we please get Compiz integration with GNOME 3 before the first official release? Thanks!