When they moved from Unity to Gnome shell, you could read all over the OMGUbuntu comments that people actually liked Unity and wished they would keep it.
It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.
Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.
The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.
And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.
I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 with Unity right now. Unity wasn't bad. I disliked it at first because it lacked features and it wasn't polished. After some time a lot of people started liking it.
But they messed up with Unity 8 and Mir. They didn't want to work with the community, they didn't care if they were working on stuff that already existed. Instead of working with the upstream devs, they worked alone. Where did they end up? Back to Gnome Shell with a lot of years of effort down the drain.
EDIT: As a reply to this pointed out, these predate the things I claimed were created from NIH syndrome. Please disregard.
Original comment:
They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar.
I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various forms for a long time. But their management has some serious NIH problems.
> They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar... their management has some serious NIH problems.
Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively.
It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS community.
I would agree with you in this about snaps IF snap were somewhere close to production level software.
Nobody can assemble some new kind of app packaging, slowing the starting speed to 5-10 seconds and call that "good rounded software"
"It is just a couple of seconds more sometimes, not a big deal" isn't going to cut it. Most of the Internet using Ubuntu, already knows that.
I think Canonical is again in denial.
It already happened a couple of times: MIR, Unity (buried by not being community driven probably), Unity8, the mobile project or something, all but forgotten now.
This snap thing is probable the pet project from a couple top guys in Canonical. Maybe hundreds of powerpoint presentations have been watched about some "big strategy" for the next years, but they didn't know the thing (snap) is unbearable slow.
I was annoyed at many of the moves Ubuntu made and voiced that, but at the end of the day, I kept using it. When 20.04 came out, I uninstalled snap. If I'm forced to use snap, I'm gone.
There's no comparison.
The recent I ran Debian and now Ubuntu will be gone. Evaporated in a poof of smoke. I'll be elsewhere. Probably back to Debian.
It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.
Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.
The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.
And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.