It's been an open secret for years now that the branches of the federal government tend to "bury" their budget inside of other allocations to hide them from outsiders, supposedly explaining the existence of $500 hammers and $1,000 toilets. Is the NSA also doing this, but with bandwidth rather than dollars? It might explain how suddenly the various ISPs are up in arms about bandwidth hogs and how a small percent are using up the majority of the bandwidth available on the network....
Because none of that other UI desktop stuff exists on the Ubuntu repos. Nope, not at all. You're not allowed to install them even if they do.
You mean like Gnome 2.xx? Go ahead and try, see how far you get. Even trying to install the MATE fork results in a multitude of breakage all over the system, because of dependencies related to the increasingly ironic "Unity" desktop.
I've been looking for a replacement to Ubuntu for a while now and have begun moving on to Debian as a result with frequent stops here and there to try out other distros to see if any come close to working as well for me as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. So far the only one which does is Debian and even then there's all sorts of stuff that I have to relearn while missing the way Ubuntu used to handle it...
So yeah, 'forced' is an apt description. I (and many others) have been forced to make a decision between keeping our Gnome 2.xx desktop and Ubuntu. Sadly unlike those who still cling to Windows XP those of us who use Linux are unable to simply use the older versions because of how quickly bitrot sets in and how difficult it becomes to install applications.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne