The project has lost a good deal of its funding, from what I've heard, and now has a lot less backing from the technical community (I think Collabora are the only backers now), placing the project's overall management mainly into the hands of educators, who don't tend to be the best at that side of things.
So you end up with things where various parts of their various websites are broken, and there isn't as much well-handled PR going out.
However, they are still somewhat active [0], but at a much smaller scale. Focusing on individual classrooms as goals, rather than the massively ambitious target of One Laptop Per Child in entire nations.
There are some really cool apps that would be better served in a more traditional Android/iOS style tablet interface. OLPC is/was very pushy about their point of view.
Sugar is mainly built for kids that never had access to a computer before a Sugar-based one (kids in developing countries; so I'm not the target audience either), so that might explain some of your complaints.
There's no clear benefit to visually alluding to a near universal symbol of danger and poison. Especially considering that we really try to reinforce that association in young children. I certainly don't think it's going to cause kids emotional trauma or cause them to later drink whatever bottle of "Sugar game juice" they find under the kitchen sink, but with an nearly endless amount of alternatives why use that one?
I haven't thought of this. Makes sense.
I believe it's "Stop". Stop sign and the square is the stop symbol common for media.
Anecdotally I’ve never seen a floppy disk in real life.
First of all, before even clicking through, my reaction to the name was negative. To quote henrikberggren's comment: "Naming a learning platform 'Sugar' is like naming a rehab clinic 'Heroin'."
Second, those stick figures look like skull-and-crossbones.
Third, your sample "fun activity" looks less fun than anything a kid with a computer has access to.
Fourth, creating a new user in your Sugarizer demo is an awful experience. It asked me to pick a name first, then let me go through the rest of the steps -- including "choosing" a new avatar color by clicking to get random colors until I just gave up -- and then, at the end, told me the user "foo" already exists.
Fifth, I don't find the UI intuitive at all. When I'm inside an activity, if I want to go back to the activity selection page, I have to click on an octagon with a square inside it. No idea how I'm supposed to associate that with "home" or "back" or any of the verbs I could think of.
Lastly, I tried out a few of the activities and I have no idea how any of that is supposed to help kids learn or collaborate. The "clock" activity just displays a clock. That's it. The "tam tam" activity has a confusing UI, but once you overcome the confusion, you can just pick different instruments to hear their sound. The most confusing was the "maze" activity, because I pressed one arrow key and it solved the whole maze. Later I realized that it follows the path until a decision point and then waits for input, but it's really weird.
I appreciate that this must have taken substantial effort, but I have no idea just how this is supposed to be useful. And let's face it, I gave it more time than an average visitor probably would.