Story

Over the years, I have drifted from Redhat, Gentoo, Debian and finally to Ubuntu about five years ago. I just found that Ubuntu was a reference point for many project releases even if the projects also release source code as well. I guess the latest high profile version of this is Steam on 12.04. Anyway, aside from linking Amazon to search queries which I disable, my functionality and use of Linux has not (yet) been greatly affected by Canonical's decisions with its Linux distribution and Unity window manager. I guess I don't really care where various UI elements get put at the end of the day as long as I can find them. I quite like the Dash search.

That said, I remain puzzled why Canonical seems to care to fix UI elements to particular places in the first place? I am not sure what they gain from this?