A small change in Unity has caused a controversy on Launchpad

Apr 18, 2013 07:52 GMT  ·  By

The icon of the Dash Launcher in Unity, for Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), is apparently wrong because it swirls in the wrong way.

The previous Ubuntu installment, 12.10, has a simple and non-swirling icon for the Dash Home button, but Canonical has changed it for Ubuntu 13.04.

Canonical's Matthieu James, a very well established designer for Ubuntu, has pointed out that there's something wrong with the icon used for the Home button in the launcher. More specifically, it turns the “wrong” way.

“If you allow me to add a little comment, life must go forward, not backwards, as I am sure you want to do with your operative system, but subconsciously you are telling people exactly the opposite.

“The new Ubuntu logo (13.04) is running in an Anti-clockwise way and not in a clockwise way. In the Latin world, ‘sinistro’ is used for anti-clockwise, and ‘sinistro’ also means, wrong, direction, accident, among many other things,” stated Matthieu James in a Launchpad bug submission.

It's safe to day that not all of Canonical's developers were happy with the idea. The most vocal of them was Steve Riley, in a harsh comment about the proposed modification.

“Who gets to set the rules that clockwise is ‘correct’ and counter-clockwise is ‘incorrect’? The notion that left = bad and right = good is steeped in ancient (and wrong) beliefs about what nature prefers. Consider the centuries of abuse that left-handed folks had to endure, for instance.

“That clocks move ‘clockwise’ is a completely arbitrary decision and has nothing to with life moving forward or backward,” said Canonical's Steve Riley.

The guys from ubuntu-docs and ubuntu-manual weren't too happy about this change, as well. They complained about not having enough time to retake all the screenshots, but their complaints were settled fairly quickly.

The update hasn't arrived yet in the daily build, but it will be implemented in the final version of Ubuntu 13.04.