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Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically. Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situat

Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically. Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situation. And Gnome shell, quite frankly, sucked. IMO it still sucks, but back then it sucked WAY worse.

toyg 6y ago
Yeah, I wouldn't put down Ubuntu's traditional attitude as "we'll copy something so we can own it" - it's more of a "we'll do whatever we think is better for the experience we provide, screw the community". Which is still misguided and fundamentally doomed to fail in the long run, but not as malicious as, say, Apple's moves. At the end of the day the scorecard reads: - Mir: failed - Unity: failed - Snap: mostly failing Meanwhile RedHat takes over stuff that doesn't work, makes it work a bit better, and pushes it on the whole ecosystem as "the" solution. And they win, and win, and win.
- O_H_E 6y ago
  > - Snap: mostly failing As much as I hate Snap and remove it from my Kubuntu systems, I don't see where it is failing. I frankly see a lot more non-linux-focused vendors support to snap than flatpak. Could you expand on that point?
  - toyg 6y ago
    It took years to get any sort of buy-in from app-developers, and I know quite a few users who are actively running from it. Just last week I helped a friend who was surprised and somewhat disgusted by the fact that certbot seems to have embraced it. It’s not a question of which one will succeed between snap and flatpak, it’s whether the ecosystem really needs either one of those.
- bregma 6y ago
  Mir is still going as one of the better Wayland compositors out there. Unity didn't fail: ongoing development on it was cancelled because there was no way to successfully monetize it. It was, and remains, one of the most successful desktops out there.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Everybody knows how the FOSS ecosystem works: if you don’t get buy-in from the community, a project dies. Unity wasn’t adopted by the community, and as soon as sugar-daddy money ran out, it died. That’s what failure looks like on the Linux desktop.
    - bregma 6y ago
      Unity had fantastic buy-in from the community. There were more installations of Unity 7 than there were of Gnome 3 or KDE 4 back when it was still being distributed. If your definition of community is "people who develop desktop environments for open source software" then you're already limiting the size of your community to a few dozen or so individuals, and we had a few dozen contributors to Unity so I'm not convinced of the strength of this argument. If your definition of community is "people who don't use Unity" then of course "everybody knows" that's trivially true. Some people also know it's a tautology.
- merb 6y ago
  > Unity: failed unity failed because they abadoned it, but it was way better than wayland+gnome. the problem was that it was based on gnome2 and had mir under its belt, so it would've been really really hard to somehow upgrade it
- pabs3 6y ago
  Unity is still around, it was forked by the community and renamed to Lomiri: https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
account42 6y ago
> Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically. What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that? > Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situation. And AppImage came before snap.
- andagainagain 6y ago
  > What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that? From the mir technical architect (found on askubuntu): https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/ https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envi... > And AppImage came before snap. Exactly right! And if the ONLY goal was compatibility, we all should be using appimage over snap. But snap was and is trying to promise more in terms of end-user security and transactional updates from the vendor. So there is a legitimate reason to make something new.

toyg 6y ago

Yeah, I wouldn't put down Ubuntu's traditional attitude as "we'll copy something so we can own it" - it's more of a "we'll do whatever we think is better for the experience we provide, screw the community". Which is still misguided and fundamentally doomed to fail in the long run, but not as malicious as, say, Apple's moves. At the end of the day the scorecard reads: - Mir: failed - Unity: failed - Snap: mostly failing Meanwhile RedHat takes over stuff that doesn't work, makes it work a bit better, and pushes it on the whole ecosystem as "the" solution. And they win, and win, and win.

O_H_E 6y ago
> - Snap: mostly failing As much as I hate Snap and remove it from my Kubuntu systems, I don't see where it is failing. I frankly see a lot more non-linux-focused vendors support to snap than flatpak. Could you expand on that point?
- toyg 6y ago
  It took years to get any sort of buy-in from app-developers, and I know quite a few users who are actively running from it. Just last week I helped a friend who was surprised and somewhat disgusted by the fact that certbot seems to have embraced it. It’s not a question of which one will succeed between snap and flatpak, it’s whether the ecosystem really needs either one of those.
bregma 6y ago
Mir is still going as one of the better Wayland compositors out there. Unity didn't fail: ongoing development on it was cancelled because there was no way to successfully monetize it. It was, and remains, one of the most successful desktops out there.
- toyg 6y ago
  Everybody knows how the FOSS ecosystem works: if you don’t get buy-in from the community, a project dies. Unity wasn’t adopted by the community, and as soon as sugar-daddy money ran out, it died. That’s what failure looks like on the Linux desktop.
  - bregma 6y ago
    Unity had fantastic buy-in from the community. There were more installations of Unity 7 than there were of Gnome 3 or KDE 4 back when it was still being distributed. If your definition of community is "people who develop desktop environments for open source software" then you're already limiting the size of your community to a few dozen or so individuals, and we had a few dozen contributors to Unity so I'm not convinced of the strength of this argument. If your definition of community is "people who don't use Unity" then of course "everybody knows" that's trivially true. Some people also know it's a tautology.
merb 6y ago
> Unity: failed unity failed because they abadoned it, but it was way better than wayland+gnome. the problem was that it was based on gnome2 and had mir under its belt, so it would've been really really hard to somehow upgrade it
pabs3 6y ago
Unity is still around, it was forked by the community and renamed to Lomiri: https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/

account42 6y ago

> Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically. What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that? > Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situation. And AppImage came before snap.

andagainagain 6y ago
> What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that? From the mir technical architect (found on askubuntu): https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/ https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envi... > And AppImage came before snap. Exactly right! And if the ONLY goal was compatibility, we all should be using appimage over snap. But snap was and is trying to promise more in terms of end-user security and transactional updates from the vendor. So there is a legitimate reason to make something new.