If by "I don't mean that as a slight, I do think it's a little silly to get upset about Ubuntu's default WM and claim to 'understand UNIX'" you mean it's possible for a hacker to change back from Unity to another interface. I must concur... but dissent on the fact that doing so is easy for a regular geek. It's not. It may be easy to the people that do ""understand Unix"". But for myself, I found that it was easier saying it than doing it. Not impossible... true. However since I'm not a great "hacker" but a mere guy with some understanding of the terminal, it proved to be a real mess.
Huh? You don't need the terminal. You can chose the environment in the login screen, there's a drop down menu besides your name. Not exactly intuitive, but very easy to find out using Google or a forum. If you want Gnome 3, you can install it from the repositories (again, no terminal required, at least not in 11.10), and it'll be there in the drop down menu.
Yes I was speaking of Gnome3. And No. It's not only "Install it from the repositories". Maybe it worked easily for you.. but for me t'was horrible. And yeah, I ended up having to mess around in the terminal and lynx to solve the problem (I had no other computer and was not going to always reboot to windows to Google something while tidying everything up). But yeah you can always say that's because I'm a noob, and was unable to do it right... but that's exactly the problem. A "newbie" should not have that kind of problem.
Sorry then. I guess it's only foolproof when it actually works#. My own upgrade experience wasn't for the faint of heart. I hope it was a learning experience, at least; it usually is for me. ;)
Beginners shouldn't have this kind of problem; but put another way, beginners shouldn't mess with this stuff unless they're willing to have this kind of problem (I'm sure most of us have been there, willingly).
# I'm not sure Ubuntu is particularly bad in this regard. It seems to be universal among all the operating systems (and everything else, for that matter). But I guess Linux is more likely to drop you to a shell, which might be scary for beginners.
I personally don't hate Unity, I just wished I could do simple things like change my screensaver out of the box with Ubuntu 11.10 without having to add xscreensaver. I just thought that was basic functionality enough today to be included like it was one release ago. I'm eyeing Arch Linux right now and I'm getting ready to migrate.
