Ubuntu's website shows of its Dash "Spotlight", Launcher "Dock", Status Icons "Menu bar with status", Workspace "Spaces", Ubuntu Store "Mac App Store".
It's almost like they're trying to directly compete with Mac OS X, with "killer features" that match exactly with what apple regularly shows off with Mac OS X.
Probably a good strategy. I would like to have a pretty good OSX clone for PCs. There's no good reason to clone Windows -- if you have a PC you can just use the real thing. You cannot (easily) run OSX on a PC.
Besides that, Windows is insanely complicated. There are zillions of little panels, little things that make other things happen, you have that crazy google-to-find-a-program-that-does-what-you-need and then download it and entrust your machine to a foreign executable (you run it as an administrator in order to install it) and begin that ridiculous next-next-next-finish dance. And do that for every updated version.
The first pitch I ever heard for Beagle was 'it's like searchlight', so I always assumed it came later- but I looked it up, and it's hard to tell. inotify 0.8 was announced about a month after Steve Jobs started advertising spotlight, and Beagle grew out of Dashboard which certainly has design documents that indicate they wanted to do that. So... I think you might be right.
Funny. Apple takes features from other OSes like Linux. Linux in turn takes features prominent in Apple's marketing strategy for OS X and replicate it in their own.
Docks of one sort or another have been around for years. RISC OS had a dock-like icon bar in 1987, GNUStep nicked one from NeXTStep in 1994, and I'm sure there are earlier examples.
That's an interesting point. If so, would it not be a little misguided?
I'd love to see some data one way or the other, but in my experience and among my friends and associates, people who buy Apple computers are incredibly likely to value the polished, "just works" factors of OS X and if they do care about being UNIX-like, it has them covered too. Then among those who run Linux as a primary OS, they do so without paying for the shiny Apple hardware. Again I stress this is a personal subset and I welcome it being corrected or confirmed by hard numbers.
At the same time, perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way:
If you have a goal of being the best desktop experience, then better to pit yourself against the best?
Don't forget moving the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the left side of the window toolbar. At least that's easy to change.
I really like Ubuntu because it comes out with an update every 6 months so users keep getting the newest software but I can't stand this flagrant Apple copy-cat ism. Is there any Debian based linux that updates reliably and has a sane UI?
Linux has had those things for longer that Mac has with the exception of the global menu.
Docks have been around before Finder adopted a dock. Beagle predates Spotlight. Workspaces have existed for as long as GUIs have for Linux and Apt has been around for over a decade, with the Ubuntu Software Center in its present form predating the Mac App Store.
It's almost like they're trying to directly compete with Mac OS X, with "killer features" that match exactly with what apple regularly shows off with Mac OS X.