[qznc]

There was a time when Ubuntu had hugely better usability than Debian. Nowdays, Debian has mostly closed the gap. Thank you Canonical for the competition! Ubuntu/Canonical has lost its focus on the desktop. Desktops are boring now. Servers are more profitable and the entry to mobile has failed.

Maybe another window has opened for some desktop innovation now? I would try to copy stuff from Android. Snap [0] is a promising way to deploy apps (in general, self-contained stuff you cannot depend on), even commercial/proprietary ones. The "app store" is terrible, though. Androids intents might be worthwhile to copy to decouple things. Androids activity lifecycle might be interesting. All of this requires a large-scale long-term reengineering of deeper layers, which is practically impossible for hobbyists. You will get hit a lot by people for being not-Unixy (see systemd) and only after years of slog you might be able to show a superior desktop.

On the other hand, there is no money to be made with desktops, so why should a company approach such a risky project?

[0] https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/snappy

[eeZah7Ux]

> Thank you Canonical for the competition

One of those examples where competition does not help at all.

Many desktop users and contributors moved to Ubuntu and stopped contributing to Debian. A good number slowly moved back to Debian in the last 5 years.

[qznc]

I believe it helped. Canonical invested in usability and raised the bar in general. Maybe for clarification, I'm thinking about stuff like the Papercuts initiative [0] in 2009.

There is a similar situation with clang and gcc. Clang improved error messages and raised the bar. Gcc follows. It would probably not have improved on its own.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/06/canon...