I agree they do not have the personnel to put out a major software component like this themselves. Just go to Launchpad and read the bug reports for their fork

I agree they do not have the personnel to put out a major software component like this themselves. Just go to Launchpad and read the bug reports for their forks. Here is a typical nux bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nux/+bug/846444 https://bugs.launchpad.net/nux/+bug/846444 So Canonical decides to go off the beaten path and create nux. Dozens of Ubuntu users indicate a problem. Indicating at least hundreds of people probably see this problem? Resolution? Nothing for 10 months. Then "Gee, our nux developers have been at work on a cool new version instead of fixing bugs, why not upgrade to that and try it out". With Ubuntu upstream libraries from Gnome, freedesktop.org, Debian etc., you have a confluence of people from different distros who can work on bugs that come up. With these Canonical forks, realistically only Canonical employees are going to fix 95% of their forks. But they're too busy working on the next cool thing to fix bugs. My Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop currently has hundreds of zombie lightdm processes running on it. I reboot but they come up again. This is not specifically a Canonical fork problem, but is an annoying bug and I and many Ubuntu users have come across many of these bugs. I can imagine what Ubuntu will look like as it forks more and more functionality, and less and less help for bugs can gain help from Gnome and fd.o.