> We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent). I'm an Ubuntu fan. With that s

> We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent). I'm an Ubuntu fan. With that said, I agree that GTK tooling could definitely be better. However, rather than branching off to Flutter, I would much rather see Canonical unite around GNOME technologies and use Vala/GTK. In a broader sense, I believe Ubuntu is branching off too much and in a number of ways. I myself, and several users I know, have left Ubuntu after the decision to push Snaps so heavily. Flatpak has a number of advantages, and I believe Canonical's efforts would be better spent helping to improve Flatpak rather than building a competing product. Fundamentally, I believe Ubuntu's vision should be a Debian derivative whose system is updated via aptitude/dpkg on the awesome interim/LTS release schedule that made Ubuntu great. Userspace apps, on the other hand, can and probably should be sandboxed in the form of Flatpaks, which would provide rolling releases and system isolation. With the combined efforts of Canonical and the rest of the community centered on Flatpak, much could be gained. Ubuntu Desktop, being a desktop distribution, should choose one desktop environment and embrace it wholeheartedly. With GNOME being the environment of choice, I believe Ubuntu should ship GNOME's core apps by default (https://apps.gnome.org/ https://apps.gnome.org/) and no more, no less. Along this vein of thought, while it's cute to have a rebranded version of GNOME software and call it the "Snap Store", that honestly feels tangential. Instead, Ubuntu should use a mostly vanilla GNOME software center (and not a renamed one), and as I said above, switch the Ubuntu ecosystem from Snaps to Flatpak. Ubuntu was great not when it was different, but when it provided stable, sane defaults that "just worked."