Or going back to Debian, depending on what they came to Ubuntu for in the first place.

Yep

..going back to Debian myself, Unity is very half-arsed, unfinished, and restrictive, and slows me down. It's one of several things I need to disable on a newly-installed default Umbongo box to make it pleasant to use. I have stuck with it on one desktop and it's really getting on my nerves now.

I predate distros, then remember playing with Softland, Slack and all that other stuff, so maybe my standards are a little... different..

Mint advocates annoy me due to being advocates ("if you only have a hammer"..)., It's probably high time I went back to Debian for my Linux boxes. I will grin and bear the neo-Stallamist carping, as they have made great strides in tidying the distro up, making the installer nice, making it easy to find ISOs etc.. I might even point other people at it too, on this basis.

However, Mint is still a bit of a "OMG mee to"(tm) in my mind, reminds me of all those Mandrake/Mandriva kids during the Distro Wars. I will be delighted to be proved wrong in the coming years, but for now, it only has negative associations for me- entirely subjective, I know.

However, the nice thing, we can toss around switching distros, as it's all free, so no-one needs give a rat's raes about my slightly crazily skewed opinions. Yay!

And I'll be trying Fedora

after falling foul of the bug linked below that is now nearly six years old in Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/34813

But which Fedora may have a fix for:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492615

Maybe

Until you find out just how big some of the machines in that percentage actually are.

Err

"What I want from a TV is a monitor"

think the clue is in the question

"Most decent TVs today [] are all so crippled and locked into walled-gardens"

I don't understand why this matters (especially as you want your hub to be elsewhere). The walled garden does not prevent viewing of local content (photos, videos, ...) over the local network under your control. I used to own a PS3 and while I could use it to surf, I didn't bother (other than the PS Store) because I use my PC, laptop, ... for that. So, I wouldn't care about some CE manufacturer walling up the internet on my Smart TV (as yet unbought).

If your point is that to get a decent TV (picture quality, inputs, net connections, ...) you have to pay extra for all sorts of crap you don't want then you may have a point but where's the evidence that these things are rated as premium features by the marketing men? I have a feeling (not backed up with facts, I grant you) that they are really just shiney things to distract the gullible. The release schedule for TVs is such that the time to wait for rinky-dinky new (and expensive) features to become standard is less than a year

Ubugma2

> I have seen stories about GNU/Linux getting on to consumer devices one too many times.

The basic problem that Ubuntu would have as the engine in a TV is its interface. While Unity may (though I'm sticking to Gnome on my 10.04 boxes) be fine for a multi-cored, 2+GHz screamer with several GB of RAM and a graphics card that can run a virtual universe in your office. It's less than useful in a TV where cost, complexity, power, fan noise and board size must be minimised.

The good news is that there are alternatives. Appliances such as The Dreambox run a GUI called Enigma2 that provides pretty much all the functionality and expansion (users can download and install modules on it) necessary to run a TV. While it has a few rough edges which we can forgive due to it's OSS-ness it largely does the job.

If I was Mr. Ubuntu I'd be seriously looking at this sort of front end for a slim format Linux/Ubuntu badged TV that (with the addition of an outboard HDD/SSD) did most of the stuff that all the boxes underneath your home TV did between them, now.

@Pete 2

Nooooo. Unity is not fine on a multi-core 2GHz screamer. Touch-focused interfaces for touch-based devices, and the traditional desktop metaphor for desktop devices. (10-foot interfaces are a third category.)

Agreed - it's looking more and more like a big f-up for Canonical lately. If they really aren't expecting tablet Ubuntu until 2014 why has the touch/smallscreen-centric interface been made the default option now? Also re the 2014 earliest tablet date, how do they propose to be relevant when the big boys have had 2-3 years of refining existing products and entrenching themselves in the market?

Why does seemingly everyone hate Unity on the desktop?

I've been using it for ages and it works fine. No better or worse than Gnome2, and given it's much younger I expect it to just get better and better. Each version is already an improvement over the last.

Thumbs down - really?

What, no Toes Down?

It's not just counter-intuitive....

...it's also stupid.

Once you know where something is in a menu, there it is. Two or three mouse-clicks and it's open.

But searching needs at least three or four keys on the keyboard.

Menus lasted a long time, because they work well.

(And don't get me started on those ridiculous vanishing scroll-bars...)