For me, Ubuntu has always been the "Linux for newbies" a little bit like Mandrake was in the time. I'm not saying that all Ubuntu users are newbies.. but Ubuntu is the distro to starts with if you're a beginner. Lots of my university friend who had no knowledge of Linux would get up and running with Ubunty in minutes. (A live cd, tool to help create partitions, [next], [next], automatically configure network). I mean, a Windows user would almost feel at home on Ubuntu.

Soooo, I find it weird that the author complains about Ubuntu saying it's not the right direction. We all know there are dozen of distributions and dozen of window managers. By all means, if you don't like the new updates, just take a WM more lightweight (For instance, fluxbox, awesome, stumpwm, xmonad, etc.) As for the distro, I'm using ArchLinux for a couple of years and I'm loving it.

It's not that I don't like beautiful intuitive UI; it's just that it's not for me (At least on my computers). However, I've got an iPhone and I love the fact that everything just work. But please, don't force me to use GUI everywhere on my desktop; let that for people who enjoys the everything just work.

But then, maybe I'm wrong. I assumed that Ubuntu always was axed for beginners.. Was I wrong with that assumption?