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From OMG! Ubuntu!

The stress is in by default, and I think it will be easy to go back to classic Gnome or Gnome Shell anytime.

It’s a bold move anyway, but I don’t agree with Mark Shuttleworth when he says it doesn’t have to be seen as Ubuntu moving away from Gnome. Don’t subestimate the defaults!

The whole plan is interesting, because we’re going to see the reaction of a large community to the changes dictated by Canonical (a company) in Ubuntu, a distribution that used to focus on community, and now it looks more like a product focused on differentiation.

Update:

Unfortunately, this choice of Unity as the desktop user interface, instead of supporting the steadily progressing GNOME Shell project and trying to influence the direction of that project, is another step on the path to the siege mentality.

From Ubuntu to move to Unity as default desktop for 11.04 by Dave Neary. Interesting reading.