[wildmusings]

Wow, they've abandoned Unity, LightDM, and Mir (for desktop at least) in favor of Gnome, GDM, and Wayland. They must have poured unspeakable man-years of engineering into those projects, and have now abandoned them in favor of what everyone else was doing all along.

Does anyone know to what extent these were pure engineering decisions vs. a scaling back of ambitions (and budget?) for the Ubuntu project as a whole?

[josteink]

Canonical mostly did those projects to assist/enable Ubuntu Phone, in ways the wider Gnome/Opendesktop/Wayland community had little interest in supporting.

With Ubuntu Phone officially dead, Canonical literally had nothing to gain by working outside the community, and had no good arguments for why they should keep on doing their own thing in these aspects.

It must have been a tough decision to make, but I'm sure it was the right one. It was widely applauded from the rest of the Linux-community.

[sz4kerto]

Not unspeakable at all. We're talking about a (few) hundred man-years, tops (probably less than that, depending on how strict you are). Ubuntu devs have mentioned in the past that Mir could have been finished with an extra $1M (which is ~ 10 man-years), but Canonical/Mark S. didn't want to invest that money into it.

So the whole Linux-on-the-desktop is extremely underfunded compared to any moderately serious enterprise project.

[Santosh83]

Apparently Mir is still being developed for IoT devices, so it's not abandoned in the same way Unity is.