*brrring* *brrring*. Today I got a call. It’s my dad.

“Hi Tim, I just had an update box pop up on our Ubuntu computer so I updated like you told me and it’s all changed. WTF?“

My parents have a Lenovo Thinkcentre with Ubuntu on it. It runs very nicely and has worked really well over the last few years. They’re very comfortable with it now, running updates, using thunderbird, etc. I’ve got them over all the hurdles that typically some face moving End Users to new environments.

Then: Unity. At first I’ve not really cared. I mean, if people want to bicker about window managers, random companies, communities etc, that’s fine. They can do it, I probably won’t pay much attention.

Thinking about it, my parents were originally moved to Gnome when KDE4 turned out to be a faily version of KDE3, back in the day.

Now someone really needs to grow some balls, admit enough is enough and stop the user interface rampage. Well, I say someone needs to; Ubuntu can do what they want with their user experience as far as I’m concerned; I can’t support end users on constantly changing desktop environments like this. No, the LTS Edition is not an option. I want out, for me, and my users.

I’ve enjoyed the efforts of the Ubuntu project since 2007, it’s early marketing efforts I felt were innovative, clever, and clearly very successful. I’ve been rubbed the wrong way one too many time by what I perceive as arrogance and unfortunately, I think this is the final straw. I’m not bitter, the community is full of great people and great developers, but I don’t think I can keep on recommending it.

I love the Debian project, the community (Mao FTW), the support, the stability, the security. On servers, I’ve always recommended Debian over Ubuntu every day of the week.

I’ve not touched Debian desktops since the days of Etch, possibly Sarge, and I think it’s time to find out about migrating to Debian Squeeze desktops.

So long buddy, and bon voyage.