Comment by unethical_ban

6 hours ago

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.