Yes, I'm usually not one to whine about "fragmented" project spaces and "wasted talent", but Mir is a special case because the Linux desktop is necessarily depe

Yes, I'm usually not one to whine about "fragmented" project spaces and "wasted talent", but Mir is a special case because the Linux desktop is necessarily dependent on cooperation from hardware vendors. Historically, they've seen Linux as a source of confusion, and avoided wading too deep because they couldn't really make anyone happy, and because it was hard to tell if their investment would pay off or if they'd have to redo all the work when the "community" decided to shift again. With Wayland, we had the opportunity to present a unified, modern desktop environment to them and say "Here, support this and we'll be happy". Then Mir showed up with absolutely no substantiation or value proposition and retriggered the prospect of nightmarish half-support across a fragmented ecosystem, which tires everyone out, not just vendors. It was a great illustration that open-source and Linux haven't changed: they're still difficult to work with, and you still don't know if the engineering effort you're dedicating is going to be flushed away due to distro infighting. NVIDIA had already said they were playing a wait and see game before committing more resources to the next-gen Linux desktop, and Canonical only proved their decision right.