[michaelmrose]

You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from.

If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters.

For what its worth I think they date from around the same time.

https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015

The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu.

It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.

[rbanffy]

> It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.

I have a feeling many of these decisions are driven by internal politics than proper analysis. The first question when you decide to go your own way is whether others will find this more useful than the competition. Build better tools is not sufficient if you don’t invest in evangelising and great branding.