Comment 22 for bug 527458

A Long Term Support release is definitely not a valid field for experimentation. Imagine marketing to a corporation an LTS release that has whimsical, experimental, user-disapproved UI changes, and telling them that if they buy it, they'll be stuck using the dysfunctional UI for five years. (Does that make anyone else think of Microsoft and Vista?)

If Ubuntu wishes to experiment with removing tooltips or other major UI elements, they should publish a PPA and ask for testers, and put up some test systems at their conferences and ask attendees to sit down for a few minutes and give their input. At the most, they should roll out the change in an alpha or beta release and gather serious feedback before making a final decision for the final release.

I use Kubuntu anyway (which is a whole 'nother sob story of decline; still using Hardy here because subsequent releases are all fundamentally broken), but it's attitudes and decisions like this that will probably send me back to Debian before long. I say this sadly, because I used to be fond of Ubuntu and encouraged other people to use it, and I'd really like to see Ubuntu start making wiser decisions again.

Mr. Shuttleworth, please do not turn into a free-software version of Steve Jobs, killing this or that on a whim just to give it a try, unwilling to compromise for the greater good.