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 a

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.