Ubuntu disaster
I love Ubuntu. It replaced the mix of Debian sid+experimental that I had been using for the last three years pretty much the day it came out. I’m glad they’re working hard with the upstream Debian distribution and think their track record is pretty good overall.
Hoary Hedgehog, though, has managed to pretty thoroughly alienate me. You see, a last-minute change was made that completely broke GNOME for me - Nautilus can no longer open two folders at once.
When I open a folder, the old folder just disappears. I can’t do drag-and-drop file management anymore, the UI is inconsistent, and some of the shortcuts seem to have changed.
What really got me going was this: There was no discussion and no published usability studies. OK, so it’s someone’s pet peeve. But they could have added it as an option in this release. Instead, they made it the default, silently changed the behavior when you upgraded, did not document it, did not provide a way to go back to the previous behavior, and quite obviously broke compatibility with upstream. On top of all that thre was inadequate testing since there any many broken edge cases.
In my opinion, this was an unmitigated disaster. They finally provided a gconf key to turn the new behavior off, but that’s nowhere near good enough for a user-visible change like this. I am really put out and will be going back to Debian in pretty short order if they’re going to be this insensitive to their users.