From "
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/04/11/ubuntu":
By default, when opening a folder window, the parent window closes automatically. This surprises the sort of people who will never be confident enough to investigate Nautilus's preferences, and who expect things on their own computer to stay where they left them. It is unfixably inconsistent -- it does not happen for the Computer window, or for the Desktop, or for opening documents rather than folders. And it dramatically reduces the usefulness of the file manager for managing files, as it is extremely difficult to get source and destination folders open simultaneously.
And "
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24915".
This is another horrible habit of Linux distributions. Instead of going with the default UI and look-and-feel chosen by upstream maintainers (you know, the people who
wrote the applications), distributors randomly change things that they don't like.
This is appalling for a number of reasons, but mainly because the developers of KDE and GNOME invest time and money making their respective desktop environments look and act as pleasant as possible, and distributors simply throw these changes away at a whim.
In fact, if you look at
DistroWatch, you begin to realize how many top-ranked distributions go with heavily-tweaked versions of the standard desktop environments. Fedora, Mandrake, and Ubuntu all tweak this stuff heavily. As a result, a Fedora user who sits down at a Mandrake machine is lost. What is this icon? Why is that there? Who knows? Maybe some random developer stumbled in a moment of arrogance and thought it was a "better" choice to override the decisions of the team that spent years designing and implementing the original system?
Thus, the problem above. It's not that Canonical's bastardization of Nautilus is inherently
wrong (well, I think it is bad UI, but evidently some developers at Canonical think it is good UI), it's just that now all these Nautilus users will have to relearn that "oh, we are on Ubuntu GNOME and it acts different from every other GNOME on the planet".
Perhaps this is the reason that I generally come back to Slackware and Debian. They have their faults, but they seem to offer the most consistent systems that are most in line with what the developers of those systems intended. Coincidentally, they are also much easier to use...
The other problem is that by tweaking the desktop environment heavily, you may end up introducing some new problems that might not have emerged in the original system. The only way to avoid ending up with a buggy piece of software is to have a rigorous quality assurance process, and I am 99% sure the only major Linux companies with such a process are going to be RedHat and Novell/SuSE.
So let's recap. Distributions changing random elements of your desktop environment causes:
(1) UI confusion by users who are used to "stock" environments or environments packaged by other distributions
(2) Bugs caused by changes made by distributors
(3) Flat out bad UI by rogue developers who do not understand (or maybe just don't care about) the UI decisions made by upstream maintainers