It was sleek, lightweight, polished, and easy to use. Since the first versions of Ubuntu, the layout and workflow hadn’t changed much. Each update included small tweaks and improvements, there were a few color scheme changes, but everything was largely consistent and familiar.
Less than one year later, Ubuntu releases looked like this:Ubuntu opted for a radically different user interface, called Unity, that was buggy as hell (it’s much more stable now).
This isn’t a purely Ubuntu problem, and it isn’t restricted to user interfaces. Linux distributions often make radical changes that break or change things you used to do with your computer. Again, this is not as bad as it was a few years ago, but it is still a problem.