On 19 October 2011 17:41, Ben Sturmfels
I can't comment on Unity, but Gnome 3 had a great deal of usability design and testing put in. The focus was to make it a desktop that's easy to use. The progress they've made has been amazing.
Unity too had reasonable testing and as with most (all?) of what Canonical are up to it is published in a fairly open manner: http://design.canonical.com/2011/04/unity-benchmark-usability-april-2011/
That said, some technical users may prefer a more minimal interface.
I definitely agree with this, I absolutely *can't stand* the new interfaces (either GNOME or Unity), but then again I'm a fairly technical user and run an extremely customised GNOME 2 set up as it is.
Being free software, they are free to choose another interface.
There's also actually no reason to choose another interface any time soon as the current LTS is supported until 2015: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS . If you want an Ubuntu with more modern packages but the same old GNOME interface, there's also "Ubuntu Classic" on the Login screen in 11.04 (which I'm still using). There are some issues with getting *exactly* the same interface in 11.10 right now (but then again it hasn't even been out a whole week yet). Beyond that there's plenty of other distros or PPAs to choose from. Also, fairly relevant to this thread, Phoronix are running a survey about GNOME now: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=gnome_survey Phoronix are fairly well respected and any (constructively worded!) feedback they aggregate to provide the GNOME guys is likely to be taken very seriously. Cheers, Dave