unity causes user confusion and distress

I am converting this into a question, since (1) restoring the classic interface does not require reverting to a previous Ubuntu release, (2) LibreOffice (which replaces OpenOffice.org in Ubuntu 11.04) is known to work for most users, (3) no information is given here to substantiate claims about users generally, suggesting that the intention is to report a personal experience and perhaps seek help, and (4) this does not have the necessary level of specificity to be useful to developers as a bug report. In addition to obtaining answers to the issues you've raised here, you can ask at http://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu about how to recommend general changes in Ubuntu as well as on bug reporting. Please do not hesitate to report new bugs as you find them; however, I recommend reading https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs carefully first.

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

If you have any questions you want answered about Unity (e.g., "How do I switch back to the old interface in Ubuntu 11.04?"), please feel free to post a reply in this question, reopening it and specifically indicating what those questions are.

this was intended as a sarcastic bug report to express my extreme dislike for the unity interface.

on a side note ive heard that the gnome interface will be completely removed in 11.10 can you comment on this?

I had just figured that you might want information about how to revert to the classic interface in 11.04 (since you had said it was impossible, suggesting you might not have known how to do it). I'm glad to hear you've got it covered.

"on a side note ive heard that the gnome interface will be completely removed in 11.10"

Yes, that's correct. See http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/04/ubuntu-11-10-will-not-ship-with-classic-gnome-desktop/ and comments in bug 739812. (But please do NOT post in that bug about this, as discussing the matter there would interfere with the work of people who are using that bug report to actually work toward a fix for the bug, which has serious ramifications, especially for some Ubuntu users with disabilities.) Though I suppose it's possible that the folks at Canonical will change their mind about this before Ubuntu 11.10 is released, it seems unlikely.

In some Alpha and daily-live CD images for Oneiric, I do see GNOME as a selectable session type (which was not present originally). I'm not sure whether or not this means that a standard GNOME 3 desktop is going to be included in a default installation of Ubuntu 11.10. GNOME 3 (i.e., GNOME 3 with the GNOME Shell, as distinct from GNOME 3 with the Unity shell and related components, which is--in Oneiric--what we call the Unity interface) has been available in Oneiric for some time (see http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/gnome-shell-is-finally-available-in.html), though it has never been present in the standard installation. Furthermore, in a distribution that is based on standard GNOME 3 (e.g., Fedora, when you choose GNOME as your desktop environment), the GNOME Failsafe session (which is like GNOME 2) is available. In Oneiric, the 2D failsafe will be unity-2d (see below for details), and there is no GNOME Failsafe option listed as an available session type in any of the Oneiric alphas or daily-lives I've tried out, nor in any installed Oneiric systems I've tested.

"can you comment on this?"

Sure, just know that I'm not affiliated with Canonical so my comments don't express official attitudes or positions.

In Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10, Unity as present only in the netbook versions (though you could, of course, install the ubuntu-netbook package on a desktop system, just as you could install the ubuntu-desktop package on a netbook system). In Ubuntu 11.04, Unity was the default interface for both desktops and netbooks. Unity requires GPU support, as it relies on 3D graphics acceleration, and is consequently affected by some bugs--mostly in the window manager compiz--that prevent that from working on some machines with some combinations of video cards/chips and drivers. There is also something called unity-2d, which is a reimplementation of Unity that uses only software rendering (no hardware acceleration). However, while unity-2d is available for Natty, it was not considered of adequately high reliability and usability to be used as the backup for Unity. So the GNOME 2 classic desktop was instead retained as the backup for Unity.

In Oneiric, unity-2d will be (and since some of the very earliest daily-lives, was) the failsafe session type. Oneiric will definitely support the Unity and unity-2d interfaces. The libraries that underlie a GNOME 2 desktop will probably not be present by default in Oneiric--there is no reason for them to be. Oneiric is a GNOME 3 distribution (but with Canonical's Unity and unity-2d instead of GNOME 3 with the GNOME Shell and the GNOME 3 Failsafe session which looks like GNOME 2).

By the way, I think the interface used in a GNOME Failsafe session on a GNOME 3 system is actually called "GNOME Fallback". See http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3-fallback.html. (So while the session type may be titled "GNOME Failsafe" on some distributions, the interface is called "GNOME Fallback." Similarly, in Natty, the Unity interface has session type Ubuntu and the GNOME 2 interface is called Ubuntu Classic. Names for interfaces and names for session types that provide them are not necessarily the same. Anyway, because I think this term is more commonly used and more widely recognized, I'll continue using the term "GNOME Failsafe" to refer to the 2D interface, provided by GNOME 3, which resembles GNOME 2.) I don't use any variation of GNOME on my main machine (I use LXDE via Lubuntu), so I may be making some nomenclatural mistakes in selecting the best term to use for this.

In my opinion, there is no big problem with eliminating the Classic Desktop--GNOME 2 is no longer being actively developed and will soon have the status that the Program Manager had once Windows 95 became widely adopted. (If you're familiar with Windows systems from that time period, you'll recall that the Program Manager interface was actually an option in Windows 95--at least the earlier versions of it--but hardly anybody used it and it was removed without complaint by Windows 98.) But I think there is a big problem with it being impossible, or even hard, for Ubuntu users who want to use a non-Unity GNOME Shell based GNOME 3 from doing so, **including with a GNOME Failsafe session that resembles GNOME 2**. In other words, I agree with many users (and I suspect with you, though you have not explicitly stated your position on this yet) that it would be *bad* if Ubuntu users cannot make their desktop look and act like it did before Unity was introduced.

I don't have a strong opinion on what particular easy ways should be available for Ubuntu users to use GNOME 3, including the GNOME 3 Failsafe. There could be a separate flavor of Ubuntu for GNOME 3, which offers the GNOME Fallback interface in its failsafe session type. (This could be installed by itself, or its metapackage could be installed in an existing Ubuntu system, just as ubuntu-desktop can be installed in a Kubuntu system and kubuntu-desktop can be installed in an Ubuntu system.) That would enable Canonical to ship Ubuntu only with Unity-based interfaces, while still giving users who care the easy ability to use the interface they like.

But if an interface resembling and behaving like GNOME 2 cannot be easily selected for use with Oneiric (perhaps after an easy process of installing it), then I do think that would be a bad thing.

Fortunately, Ubuntu has a strong community, including a strong community of developers; if such an interface is not initially available, it seems likely that there would be adequate volunteer developer and tester support to implement it. (But that doesn't mean I think it's fine for Canonical to "drop the ball" on this -- "seems likely" is not the same thing as "is certain.")