[pastiche]

To be fair, Ubuntu isn't really in the business of making changes

Tell that to the Unity team. Or look at the app indicators. Or notify-osd. Or wait until Wayland hits. This last one isn't Ubuntu code, but it's still a change they're pushing for.

Really, Ubuntu writes a decent amount of code and I think it's doing the distribution a disservice not to mention this.

[burgerbrain]

You do realize that the Wayland came from devs working for Red Hat right?

Didn't think so.

[pastiche]

"You do realize that the Wayland came from devs working for Red Hat right?"

I did mention that Ubuntu didn't write that code, so yes, I'm aware of that. Kristian Høgsberg, the original author, was working for Red Hat at the time he started the project. I don't know how much dev time Red Hat currently contributes in the current state of Wayland, if any.

In any case, the only ones actively pushing for Wayland use are the Ubuntu devs. Fedora has half-heartedly implied that it will use it at some point in the future. Maybe.

[burgerbrain]

Dave Airlie, a Red Hat engineer, is basically the guy when it comes to pushing progress in Linux's graphics stack. Shuttleworth declaring which way Linux development should go doesn't do shit for the community if he doesn't hire developers to see it through.

[ciupicri]

As Linus Torvalds would say: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code.".

[technomancy]

> Tell that to the Unity team. Or look at the app indicators. Or notify-osd.

Unity is (a) not fully-baked yet and (b) a big change from what Ubuntu has historically focused on in the past. App indicators an notify-osd are pretty tiny from a code perspective, though not from a design perspective.

I'm not trying to trivialize the effort of polish and design, because it's a large part of what the free software community has traditionally been fairly bad at. But it's very different from nuts-and-bolts engineering.