Those of us who have been using Gnome 2 for years have already streamlined and optimized our work flow in that environment. Whenever the UI changes, it breaks existing patterns of behavior that we usually don't even think about anymore. That's why people don't like change: it makes them less productive, at least temporarily as they streamline a new work flow. People didn't like the MS Office ribbon interface, the KDE 4 interface, etc., either. Even when Ubuntu moved the window controls to the left side, I found myself automatically and subconsciously moving the pointer to the right and clicking on an empty space, which was wasted effort and time, until I relearned that behavior.
People who haven't used Linux / Gnome before don't have those expectations and optimizations, so it's not surprising that they will have a more positive view of Unity. Also, Canonical is trying to make Unity emulate OS X to some extent, so the interface meets some expectations of Mac users. They will probably respond more positively.
I think the same thing happened to me. I had been using a tiling WM for a while before Natty came out, but I decided to give Unity a try and I generally found I could make it work pretty acceptably with just a bit of messing around, more nicely than GNOME 2 actually. I still switched back, but not for several weeks.
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Those of us who have been using Gnome 2 for years have already streamlined and optimized our work flow in that environment. Whenever the UI changes, it breaks existing patterns of behavior that we usually don't even think about anymore. That's why people don't like change: it makes them less productive, at least temporarily as they streamline a new work flow. People didn't like the MS Office ribbon interface, the KDE 4 interface, etc., either. Even when Ubuntu moved the window controls to the left side, I found myself automatically and subconsciously moving the pointer to the right and clicking on an empty space, which was wasted effort and time, until I relearned that behavior.
People who haven't used Linux / Gnome before don't have those expectations and optimizations, so it's not surprising that they will have a more positive view of Unity. Also, Canonical is trying to make Unity emulate OS X to some extent, so the interface meets some expectations of Mac users. They will probably respond more positively.
> Even when Ubuntu moved the window controls to the left side...
One of the first things I did when I upgraded to 10.04 was to move the window controls back to the right side.
http://quandyfactory.com/blog/59/ubuntu_1004_first_thoughts#...
I think the same thing happened to me. I had been using a tiling WM for a while before Natty came out, but I decided to give Unity a try and I generally found I could make it work pretty acceptably with just a bit of messing around, more nicely than GNOME 2 actually. I still switched back, but not for several weeks.