Agreed. Shuttleworth & co seem more interested in tweaking visual desktop stuff (window buttons, windicators, indicator applet, etc.) than actually making sure their software is as bug-free as possible. Every time I upgrade to the newest release (literally every single upgrade since Hardy, when I started using Ubuntu) a bunch of stuff that used to work breaks. Lucid hasn't been as bad as others (Jaunty and Karmic I'm looking at you) but it's not without its problems. And I'm running a 5-year old laptop here.
I know it's hard to control quality on a desktop sourced from thousands of individual/independent contributors, but Canonical would do well to put money into their QA department to ensure release-to-release stability instead of into their design department--which for the most part seems to be a Shuttleworth cargo-cult dictatorship anyway.
I hear ya, but these things are just as important. Poor user experience is a bug and graphical tweaks and updating the indicator platform was much needed. I will admit windicators, multitouch and head tracking parallax should take low priority, but most of their designers wouldn't be fixing driver bugs if they weren't turning up the pretty.
With the latest stable 10.04 I have had very little trouble if any. Granted I am on a ThinkPad. When I ran it on a Macbook Pro and its slightly tweaked "standard" hardware it ran like crap and took a lot of coaxing to get up and running until I just gave up and got the right hardware for the job.
They seem to be doing pretty well focusing on what they've been focusing on - end user experience.
They didn't go from nothing to #1 for no reason, you know.
Calling it a cargo-cult dictatorship is a bit unfair as well - he's footing the bill for a huge chunk of the work, why shouldn't he get a say? Nothing's stopping you from ponying up and starting your own distro dev team; you can even fork from Ubuntu and just fix the thing's you think they're lacking.
I call it cargo-cult because Shuttleworth makes UI decisions like "move the window buttons" to semi-emulate OSX, but seemingly without doing any research as to why such might succeed or fail. Originally they were even in a different order--his only concession to angry end-users was to arrange them like OSX, in a different order than originally envisioned. Or take the indicator applet: his complaint was that the regular system tray icons are cluttered and disorganized. Solution: reinvent the system tray (which had fairly clear HIG defined by Gnome, which for the most part were followed), almost bit for bit, but with different colored icons, no tooltips, and no default left-click action. If you look at the old system tray and the new indicator applet, they quite literally are almost identical in appearance/clutterdness (yes, he merged mail and IM, and with Maverick merged volume and the music player, so that's two less icons, but the usefulness of those changes is up for debate).
I call it a dictatorship because big decisions like that are made by him, seemingly by fiat. He even calls himself SABDFL (self-appointed benevolent dictator for life).
Shuttleworth is trying to be the Jobs of the OSS world--making design decisions because he thinks he knows software design best. Which is fine--like you said, he's paying for it all. But the difference between him and Jobs is that Jobs defines useable software where Shuttleworth just copies and reinvents. And in my opinion, Shuttleworth doesn't seem to have the insight into users' thought processes that Jobs has.
Again, you're right, the man is paying for it all, so who am I to complain? I can just pick a different distro. But the problem is that with all of these more serious stability problems remaining unsolved and stuff like windicators and indicator applets and fonts getting all the attention, I and others might eventually get fed up and switch to a more stable distro (does one exist? Will I go back to Windows?), or not recommend Ubuntu to friends.
What should I tell my friend: Yeah, install Ubuntu, it's great, but whatever you do, don't let it automatically update because your laptop might never suspend correctly after that?
I know it's hard to control quality on a desktop sourced from thousands of individual/independent contributors, but Canonical would do well to put money into their QA department to ensure release-to-release stability instead of into their design department--which for the most part seems to be a Shuttleworth cargo-cult dictatorship anyway.