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They already caved on the Mir->Wayland and Unity->Gnome fronts, but only after wasting significant resources and causing more unnecessary confusion/fragmentatio

They already caved on the Mir->Wayland and Unity->Gnome fronts, but only after wasting significant resources and causing more unnecessary confusion/fragmentation in the Desktop Linux space. I expect the same pattern to play out with Snap -> Flatpak, it's just a matter of when, not if. Though maybe this is uniquely sticky, like the ongoing .deb vs. .rpm / dpkg/apt vs. rpm/dnf situation since Forever...

bsimpson 3y ago
There was some speculation yesterday on why Canonical keeps picking and losing these fights: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18yvefc/why_does_the_community_always_seem_to_choose_red/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18yvefc/why_does_the... The top reasons given were: - Not Invented Here: Canonical wanting to design its own everything and not being welcoming of contributions or feedback from outsiders. - Inventing for itself first: Canonical builds what's best for Ubuntu and lets other people import the source if they want to. Other providers build in the relevant communities, which makes it easier for other distributions to import the next-gen stuff (e.g. X11 and its replacement Wayland both came from Xorg). --- While I was writing that, I was really tempted to use lowercase "canonical" to describe Xorg's relationship with the graphics stack, and then changed to "relevant" when I realized that the company being discussed is uppercase "Canonical." I wonder if how much of their self image is reflected in their name: do they they they're the canonical stewards of the Linux desktop?
- saidinesh5 3y ago
  > Other providers build in the relevant communities, which makes it easier for other distributions to import the next-gen stuff (e.g. X11 and its replacement Wayland both came from Xorg). It seems more like Redhat just employes more GNOME devs and thus Redhat's work seems like "default upstream work" while Canonical's seems like "rewrite because of NIH". It is not as if GNOME is super inviting to random outside contributions either. I haven't used GNOME/Ubuntu in a long time but I remember when Canonical wanted to go Wayland first before rolling out their own display server for their phone use case. At that time, Wayland was mostly just in Meego and related devices. I just wish these distro wars happened in the final UI layer of the software stack instead of duplicating enormous amounts of the useless/boring/core work over trivial differences. (rpm vs. deb, snaps vs. flatpaks, etc..)
soulbadguy 3y ago
Long time Ubuntu user here. I think caving is the wrong perspective. When both Mir and unity where created, the state of both X and Gnome were atrocious. From all the distribution, canonical was the main one pushing for simple, competent and bug fresh desktop experience. Sometime an industry get in a rusty/complacent space and stop improving and only creating a competing product can change things. LLVM vs GCC is probably one of the best example in OSS. People have complaining about the compilation speed of GCC and the quality of error message for ages, only when LLVM came about and focus on those area did we see GCC make significant progress. To me it's clear that without the competition (and relative success) brought on by Mir and Unity, Gnome and Wayland wouldn't be anywhere near what they are right now. In the case of Ubuntu, canonical main focus was to bring linux to the masses and brush off some of that geeky/hackery. And the ecosystem was at best in interested in it and at worst hostile to this (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2986i/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas_his_focus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2986i/why_i_qu...) So i think it was the case the canonical has not choice to create those project to fullfil their mission.And from my perspective they have succeeded. The reason ubuntu got so popular as desktop OS, is because for a long time they offered the best desktop experience. The switch to Wayland,Gnome and systemd(from upstart) also make sense. As things improve, and some of the improvement brought by those projects get into the OSS alternative it simply make less sense to keep them around. And some of those improvement are done by canonical themselves (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-shell-performance https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-sh...) Snap seems to be the continuation of this process. Installing application on linux is/was a very bad experience for a very long time. Most of the efforts in that space (which were very all over the place when snap was created) were centered around server/security/containerization. Canonical was looking for something different. I don't like snap. Mainly because of long habits, and also because the snap packages always seem to be older than what i can get through APT. But i really don't get the passionate hate snap received just for trying to solve a real problem that "regular" people might have.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > the state of both X and Gnome were atrocious. X was working fine. Gnome was always a child with problems.

bsimpson 3y ago

There was some speculation yesterday on why Canonical keeps picking and losing these fights: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18yvefc/why_does_the_community_always_seem_to_choose_red/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18yvefc/why_does_the... The top reasons given were: - Not Invented Here: Canonical wanting to design its own everything and not being welcoming of contributions or feedback from outsiders. - Inventing for itself first: Canonical builds what's best for Ubuntu and lets other people import the source if they want to. Other providers build in the relevant communities, which makes it easier for other distributions to import the next-gen stuff (e.g. X11 and its replacement Wayland both came from Xorg). --- While I was writing that, I was really tempted to use lowercase "canonical" to describe Xorg's relationship with the graphics stack, and then changed to "relevant" when I realized that the company being discussed is uppercase "Canonical." I wonder if how much of their self image is reflected in their name: do they they they're the canonical stewards of the Linux desktop?

saidinesh5 3y ago
> Other providers build in the relevant communities, which makes it easier for other distributions to import the next-gen stuff (e.g. X11 and its replacement Wayland both came from Xorg). It seems more like Redhat just employes more GNOME devs and thus Redhat's work seems like "default upstream work" while Canonical's seems like "rewrite because of NIH". It is not as if GNOME is super inviting to random outside contributions either. I haven't used GNOME/Ubuntu in a long time but I remember when Canonical wanted to go Wayland first before rolling out their own display server for their phone use case. At that time, Wayland was mostly just in Meego and related devices. I just wish these distro wars happened in the final UI layer of the software stack instead of duplicating enormous amounts of the useless/boring/core work over trivial differences. (rpm vs. deb, snaps vs. flatpaks, etc..)

soulbadguy 3y ago

Long time Ubuntu user here. I think caving is the wrong perspective. When both Mir and unity where created, the state of both X and Gnome were atrocious. From all the distribution, canonical was the main one pushing for simple, competent and bug fresh desktop experience. Sometime an industry get in a rusty/complacent space and stop improving and only creating a competing product can change things. LLVM vs GCC is probably one of the best example in OSS. People have complaining about the compilation speed of GCC and the quality of error message for ages, only when LLVM came about and focus on those area did we see GCC make significant progress. To me it's clear that without the competition (and relative success) brought on by Mir and Unity, Gnome and Wayland wouldn't be anywhere near what they are right now. In the case of Ubuntu, canonical main focus was to bring linux to the masses and brush off some of that geeky/hackery. And the ecosystem was at best in interested in it and at worst hostile to this (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2986i/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas_his_focus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2986i/why_i_qu...) So i think it was the case the canonical has not choice to create those project to fullfil their mission.And from my perspective they have succeeded. The reason ubuntu got so popular as desktop OS, is because for a long time they offered the best desktop experience. The switch to Wayland,Gnome and systemd(from upstart) also make sense. As things improve, and some of the improvement brought by those projects get into the OSS alternative it simply make less sense to keep them around. And some of those improvement are done by canonical themselves (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-shell-performance https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-sh...) Snap seems to be the continuation of this process. Installing application on linux is/was a very bad experience for a very long time. Most of the efforts in that space (which were very all over the place when snap was created) were centered around server/security/containerization. Canonical was looking for something different. I don't like snap. Mainly because of long habits, and also because the snap packages always seem to be older than what i can get through APT. But i really don't get the passionate hate snap received just for trying to solve a real problem that "regular" people might have.

hulitu 3y ago
> the state of both X and Gnome were atrocious. X was working fine. Gnome was always a child with problems.