dee certainly puts some things fairly strongly, but I don't see any purposeful trolling there, and he does bring up good points.
The reason why Canonical is not always regarded in the best light and why people express themselves about it is because Canonical is influential. There are no hard numbers, but it seems that at least companies focus on Ubuntu first and foremost when porting their products. Which means that whatever Canonical does, the vendors will try to adapt, and if Ubuntu goes the other direction than the rest of GNU/Linux distributions, then suddenly all those programs can become unportable. Yes, the chances of that happening are slight (someone may decide to create compatibility layers or what not), but you can't say they're non-existent.
And yes, the community aspect is important. Ubuntu is supposed to mean just that, but as of late Canonical has been dropping design decisions from the top, and it seems that they don't often care about what the community thinks. This is in sharp contrast with what the KDE VDG (and possibly other groups) have been doing lately ? they are outsourcing the design work to the community, where everyone can suggest ideas and improvements, and it seems to work very nicely. I didn't like the widget design, so I made some mockups of my own, and in the end together we got a design that I'm satisfied with (not exactly as I would like, but a good compromise all in all). If Canonical had applied the same methods, we wouldn't have Mir today, because Wayland developers would have explained all the misunderstandings from the get-go. Instead, we would have a fantastic Unity Wayland compositor by now, and everyone would have been happy.
The reason why Canonical is not always regarded in the best light and why people express themselves about it is because Canonical is influential. There are no hard numbers, but it seems that at least companies focus on Ubuntu first and foremost when porting their products. Which means that whatever Canonical does, the vendors will try to adapt, and if Ubuntu goes the other direction than the rest of GNU/Linux distributions, then suddenly all those programs can become unportable. Yes, the chances of that happening are slight (someone may decide to create compatibility layers or what not), but you can't say they're non-existent.
And yes, the community aspect is important. Ubuntu is supposed to mean just that, but as of late Canonical has been dropping design decisions from the top, and it seems that they don't often care about what the community thinks. This is in sharp contrast with what the KDE VDG (and possibly other groups) have been doing lately ? they are outsourcing the design work to the community, where everyone can suggest ideas and improvements, and it seems to work very nicely. I didn't like the widget design, so I made some mockups of my own, and in the end together we got a design that I'm satisfied with (not exactly as I would like, but a good compromise all in all). If Canonical had applied the same methods, we wouldn't have Mir today, because Wayland developers would have explained all the misunderstandings from the get-go. Instead, we would have a fantastic Unity Wayland compositor by now, and everyone would have been happy.
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