Configuring Gnome3/Unity and average users
 

Does anybody know why the Unity and Gnome 3 *desktop environments* chose not to include a program for easily configuring such trivial aspects as font size and require an external tool to be installed (such as the tweak tool)? Why was this design decision made? Incidentally, given the above, how does Canonical expect Ubuntu to be adopted by the average user?

I am not an average user but I expect a desktop environment that aims to be easy to use and adopted by the masses - like Unity - to include a comprehensive configuration tool.

Your thoughts?

Quick thought - these are not the DEs you're looking for.

On a more serious note, given that I'm not a DE or WM developer, I state my opinions to the developers, then go out and choose the DE or WM that suits me best. My current faves are LXDE and Cinnamon.

I absolutely agree; have in fact been using XFCE since 4.6 and never used Gnome Shell or Unity but I did try the latter a couple of weeks ago out of curiosity. And I just couldn't believe that a company (Canonical) that aims to bring a FOSS OS to the masses as well as now targeting the tablet and smartphone market didn't even think to allow its DE to be easily configurable. Frankly, I find it beyond belief.

We're technical users and thus can make informed decisions and choose the DE (and even distro) that suits us best but the same can't be said of the average user who wants something that just works and doesn't introduce radically new paradigms or feels crippled.

There is ccsm (CompizConfig Settings Manager), which, as I understand, is the default configuration tool for Unity desktop... you'll have to install it from a PPA server.

My guess on why it wasn't included in the default installation is because it's quite advanced, and you can break Unity very easily with it (as I once did :redface:) if you don't know what you're doing. Even I would reccomend that only advanced users use this tool (and I'm one that loves to fiddle around with *everything* to see how it works.)

It was a big pain in the a** for me to get everything back to normal when I broke my Unity. Normally, you'd do a unity -reset, but in my version (13.04), that option no longer works. (You'll get an error saying its deprecated, and I never found out the new command to use.)