Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings. It's also less knowledge to have to keep in your head for system administration st…
In terms of user interface have those standards delivered? I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal. Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. W…
If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!"
But they're not.
Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ...
The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...?
[Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye.
For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes.
Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?