Some punctuation would be nice.

Our tax dollars at work...........

If you don't get on with Unity you can switch back to the Gnome
desktop - when logging in, look on the bottom of the screen for the
option to switch desktop environment.

Ubuntu 11.10 is set to remove this option to switch away from Unity
but is supposed to add back some of the functionality of the previous
desktops. Given the howls of protest about Unity I hope there's more
than a smattering of previous desktops !!

Personally I think the Unity interface is great for the basic user who
only wants to do a few things on-line ( e-mail / Facebook / Web
Surfing etc... ) but the advanced user has lost a tad too much !!! I
know I for one would not wish to permanently lose multiple desktops so
I hope that gets put back in.

Won't there be an ability to download Gnome in Synaptic?

Probably, but it won't do you much good as Gnome 3 seems set to go in much the
same direction as Unity. It would seem that both the Gnome team and Canonical
have decided that they want to support the tablet user at the expense of the
desktop and laptop users - which, if that's what they want to do and where they
see the future for their product, is fine.

But, as someone else has pointed out, while fine for tablets and the kind of
'trivial' (for want of a better word) tasks you'd want to perform on them,
trying to use a Unity style desktop for 'serious' work is a major PITA and the
desktop PC is far from dead - it hasn't even suffered a flesh wound at the hand
of the tablet - which is why I personally think that the decision to abandon the
desktop user with the current incarnations of Unity and Gnome 3 is the wrong
decision.

I've decided to stick with 10.04 for the time being but, with regret, to seek a
new distro between now and the cessation of support - unless there are some
major changes in philosophy at Canonical in the meantime. It's a pity. Ubuntu
has been good to me since the Breezy Badger and it's not a decision I've made
lightly, but it's one I now feel somewhat forced to make.

Oh, and as a PS - Synaptic will no longer be part of the default install
from 11.10, according to
www.omgubuntu.co.uk/.../synaptic-package-manager-dropped-from-ubuntu-\
11-10/

I have Lubuntu on my laptop. Ease of use is great. I really like the LXDE
desktop. I have all the family and friends computers I support on Ubuntu
Gnome 10.04. But since we're all kind of frugal, think cheap, I am
currently planning moving them to the next LTS version of Lubuntu. I think
the learning curve is shorter from Gnome to LXDE than from Gnome to Unity.
There are lots of good Ubuntu based distro's out there. Download some live
CD's and give them a spin.

It's not just Unity/Gnome 3 that's making me think of leaving Ubuntu, I
just didn't want to make an already fairly long email even longer :-)

There's a conflict of philosophies between me and the current direction
Canonical seems to be going in. I could be wrong; I could be misreading
Canonical's intentions. But there are several things going on at the
moment that I have problems with. Most of these - the reluctance to
submit their code to Gnome, the whole Ubuntu Music Store/Banshee fiasco,
the apparent assumption that all Ubuntu users are clueless and need to
have all their thinking done for them amongst other things - I could
live with, just about.

But I'm afraid that, for me, Unity was one step too far. And then the
decision to axe Synaptic - OK, Software Centre will provide most of the
functionality and will even allow you to install Synaptic, but there's
hardly a day goes by when I don't use Synaptic for something - just
confirmed to me that it was time to start looking elsewhere.