Comment by ddtaylor
7 hours ago
I stopped listening to what Canonical says. They often get involved in things and disturb the ecosystem then abandon stuff or dig a "not invented here" hole.
Unity, Bazaar, Mir, Upstart, Snap, etc.
All of them had existing well established projects they attempted to uproot for no purpose other than Canonical wanted more control but they can't actually operate or maintain that control.
Ubuntu Touch... I was so excited about it that I bought one of the phones with it preloaded. I even used it as my sole daily driver for months, until I learned that I was not receiving all calls made to me. Even after that I kept hoping it would keep developing so that I could pick it up again one day. But then Canonical abandoned it instead. That's when they became as good as dead to me.
Sadly, KDE and Gnome each spent a lot of time on the same things. Plasma Mobile has ate more time that could have went into making Plasma a better desktop.
Also LXD → Incus: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/
Or ansible/chef/etc -> Juju. There's a lot of NIH to pick from at Canonical.
The project bzr was trying to uproot may not be the one you’re thinking of. First release of Bzr predates git by about a month.
Correct, and I used bzr quite a bit during that time. It was interesting in some ways, but Canonical pushed it for many years after git was obviously the better choice.
Even to this day there is a complex and archaic process of using Launchpad where git is tacked on because they stuck with Bazaar for so long.
In a way it's really sad how many swings and misses Canonical has taken in its history.
Snap is definitely not abandoned.
Sadly
It’s canonically fucked
Not sure on the timelines, but snap, upstart and Mir were all attempts at evolving Linux ecosystem that lost to RedHat-backed systems. Unity was legit abandoned, and bazaar... Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.
> bazaar... Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.
You are mistaken here. Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git appeared at about the same time, and I think Bazaar was released first.
IIRC, Bazaar tried to distinguish itself by handling renames better than other version control systems. In practice, this turned out not to be very important to most people.
(Tangent: It wasn't clear at the time whether Mercurial or Git was the better pick. Their internal design was very similar. Mercurial offered a more pleasant user interface, superior cross-platform support, and a third advantage that I'm forgetting at the moment. Git had unbeatable author recognition. Eventually, Git's improved Windows support and the arrival of GitHub sealed its victory in the popularity contest. But all of that came to pass well after Bazaar was released.)
Wayland was created in 2008. Mir was created in 2013.
Bazaar and Git were created around the exact same time.
Unity was abandoned after a failed attempt to circumvent Gnome 3. I was actually involved with the development of Compiz and they hired Sam to work on Unity, as he was one of the masterminds behind Compiz, but again they just didn't have the vision or execution to make it work.
> Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.
What?
Bzr predates git (by a few days but still). Launchpad predated GitHub by a lot. canonical just played those cards horribly and lost.