Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)

I agree that something should be done about all those "paper cuts", some of which have existed for years. Some of these problems have actually been fixed, and not just trivial usability bugs, either. Printing seems to me more or less working these days, though not as well as on OSX naturally. Still annoyance at pet peeves is understandable. What I'm not sure of is whether this implies conservatism with regard to further changes to the UI. I'm not sure that flashier improvements, like a new interface, take away too much focus from work on UI bugs. After all, the Ubuntu desktop has changed in very small increments over the past few years, say from 6.06 to 10.04. It's at a point where I seriously consider skipping releases because I don't expect many perceptible changes. A bit of movement, on the UI front as well in kernel space, is necessary for us enthusiasts not to feel stagnation.