Install Ubuntu Minimal and just download what you need. You'll get the popularity of Debian (with all those packages) and a fast system (you can install any WM and such).
On it's current state it's pretty slow and bloated. Let's hope that on six months they can fix the suck. Kudos for trying something new and not copying OSX or Windows 7.
As well as being slow and bloated, it also seems rather rough around the edges. It doesn't feel like a particularly polished product somehow.
I doubt everything will fixed in six months, but Canonical tend toward the Google model of development; release something rough first, then refine it on the whetstone of user feedback.
But if they invent something completely new, and Apple copies it Apple isn't 'ripping it off,' they are 'making it better' (e.g. 'Time Machine', 'Spotlight', etc).
Please leave these useless, 'OMG! They copied X!' comments off of HN. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants,' is how the tech world moves along.
While we're at it let's leave the drama alone too. I wasn't crying ripoff, I was using it in a design context. And from that POV, the drawing code is almost a per-pixel copy of the Dock's. Which, wouldn't happen by accident.
To be even more fair, Steve Jobs was so impressed by the innovative graphical user interface he had seen at Xerox PARC that he copied many of its features in the original Macintosh.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I wish they would copy Windows 7 a bit... a lot of the features in Win 7 that don't conflict with GNOME are really nice.
Unrelated: GNOME still doesn't understand the concept of "chunking": You only want 5-7 items in a group for people to comprehend it best. When Ubuntu's System > Preferences drop-down has 25 items in it, you have a bad UI.
The flip side of chunking is the equally-bad UI known as "wading through menu trees". I personally prefer not having to deal with finding my way through half a dozen menu levels trying to remember where I found that admin tool that I don't use often enough to build muscle memory. If you want a friendlier UI, install the Control Panel app or whatever it's called that replaces those menus with a categorized list of big, pretty icons.
I absolutely agree that a control panel window is the solution, not drop down menus. Drop downs should only be used for a small number of objects and trees, lest someone move their mouse 2px north of a path and lose ten seconds of careful navigations.
My favorite part is where they threw it all out, reset to 2003 codebase, and started from scratch basically, 18ish months before release.[1]
So from a technical standpoint, Vista took longer [5 years] and had less development time [under 2 years] actually make it into the product. (Yes, code they already had they could and did reincorporate into the final product, but still, wow.)
This post is full of snark by the way, but it is useful to know what went wrong with Vista. (TL;DR: Management of very large software development is _hard_)
It mentions it in the article, extend HTML5 with a Windows API.
They did it before with HTML, was it HTAs? You could make controls that did crazy stuff. I can't remember the name now, my old work had a few from the days when there was no browser but IE.
