Either Mark Shuttleworth does not understand power users or he is pretending he doesn’t to put spin on his message. In his recent keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Shuttleworth said:

“There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them,” Shuttleworth said. “Fortunately in Ubuntu there are tons of options and lots of choice and ways to skin the cat.”

I think he misses the point here. The people who dislike the Unity interface don’t dislike it because it looks cool. In my experience power users care deeply about the way their computer looks and are usually suckers for eye candy as long as it doesn’t hamper functionality. And that is exactly the crux of the problem: Unity currently hampers functionality a lot compared to the traditional Gnome 2 desktop that shipped in older versions. Shuttleworth just doesn’t want to accept that and thus misinterprets the misgivings many users have with Unity as unfounded and subjective. But if there is one camp that could be attacked of trying to produce something that looks cool at all costs, it’s the people advocating for and developing Unity. I think Shuttleworth is brilliantly spinning the story to preemptively  level the arguments that should be directed against him at the opposition instead.

Also, saying that there are “tons of options” within Ubuntu as far as the desktop interface is concerned is highly misleading seeing as the current Ubuntu version comes with Unity and nothing else. Naturally, power users will always be able to install other desktops but saying that Ubuntu caters to that target audience in these circumstances is just wrong, especially seeing as all the marketing material and public statements from Canonical team members seem to exclusively mention Unity. All other desktop environments are clearly second class citizens on Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done. They also stress the system in interesting ways and as such Ubuntu is going to continue to focus on usability and ease-of-use that will help power users.

And here is where he goes wrong on power users. I think he confuses the typical Mac fanbase with power users which couldn’t be further from the truth. Power users do not want things to “just work”. Power users want to customise a system to a point were it works precisely how they want it to work. That is the exact opposite from what Mr. Shuttleworth thinks. This doesn’t mean power users don’t want usability. They just don’t want usability that is dictated to them by people who think they have the be-all, end-all solution on how things must work (the late Steve Jobs comes to mind). Real power users hate that; they want control to fine tune every last aspect of their system. This is a reason why, aside from Linux, power users have generally preferred Windows as it is much more customisable than MacOS. I can myself remember using all these fancy Stardock tools that did things that would’ve been unthinkable on the Mac.

Ubuntu isn’t focused to provide that, no matter what Shuttleworth says. As far as I can see, Ubuntu is poised to become the next MacOS — a system that “just works” for people that want a good looking system that takes a lot of the responsibilities that come with a traditional Linux distribution out of their hands. These people do not care that the Canonical team makes certain decisions for them that are hard to reverse as long as they get a shiny looking, good working system. Providing this is a laudable goal, but saying that this target audience are power users is either highly confused or a downright brazen lie.

Shuttleworth stressed that he wants to make sure that the primary Ubuntu desktop offering is both easy to use, beautiful and exciting for power users.

I doubt this very much. I think what he is trying to do is make Ubuntu look as different from any other Linux distribution as possible. He might think Unity is beautiful and exciting but if he cared for power users he would provide options per default instead of making the system as simplistic as possible under the banner of “ease of use”. He also wouldn’t integrate everything Canonical does into one desktop shell, leaving the community to continue to scramble as it tries to pick up the slack for the rest of the desktop environments but rather work with the community in designing different options right into the system. Once again, ease of use and power user options aren’t mutually exclusive. The thing that collides with the wishes of power users in this case is Shuttleworth’s top-down “my way or the highway” approach to these design choices.

“There is a bit of a myth that power users don’t like and aren’t interested in usability and ease-of use. I think that’s nonsense.”

He is actually correct on this point but merely because nobody I know has ever heard of that myth. As far as I can tell, he totally made this up to frame his argument. As I have explained above, power users are usually very interested in usability. They just want many different approaches to usability all within easy reach. That is confusing to novice users and annoying to most of the Mac crowd and therein lies the conflict. Ubuntu has to decide which of the two groups it wants to appeal to and I think it has already made that decision years ago. So please don’t go around giving keynotes, telling us you love everybody and muddy your intentions with PR speak like this. You can’t please everybody and pretending to do A while you’re actually doing B will only create more resistance. What we need is clear communication, not more of this corporate spin.

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Either Mark Shuttleworth does not understand power users or he is pretending he doesn't to put spin on his message. In his recent keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Shuttleworth said: "There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we ...