this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Opinionated development is rarely popular with wider audiences. Canonical is a business geared towards providing Enterprise products and support. That's how they make money. They do what they think is best for their Enterprise customers first to keep functioning.
They "think" that, but it's definitely not the case.
Apart from the obvious vendor lock-in, their solutions were never the better approach from a technical or usability standpoint. Snaps aren't that great, their Wayland competitor wasn't particularly good, Unity was divisive. So they put tons of work into bad solutions for problems that have been solved elsewhere and better. Not the smartest business move.
You obviously don't work in the field. Example:
Canonical is a for-profit entity making solutions to sell to enterprise customers who need specific tools and results.
You on the other hand are somebody who benefits from their work and complains about it on the Internet because you think you have better solutions and ideas, but none of their resources or money.
One is way more productive and useful than the other, you see.
You obviously don't understand my point. If we want to flex, I have a combined CS/business degree, so I do understand the system quite well.
What canonical is doing is essentially a make or buy decision. Make our own solution or "buy" an existing one. Since in the foss world buying is almost free, you have to have good reasons to invest quite a lot of money into developing your own solution. Good reasons would be better technology, better integration into the existing ecosystem, lower costs, etc - or vendor lock-in.
Canonicals solutions are never better than what the community already agreed upon. They are not cheaper for Canonical, since they have to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They don't integrate better, since the rest of the system is more or less vanilla Linux.
So the only remaining rationale would be vendor lock-in. Canonical wants its customers to build upon their products so that it can retain those customers easier. This might actually be a valid reason for snap. Canonical has kind of cornered the market here, but it's definitely not true for Mir, Unity, etc. Those were doomed from the start and a huge waste of money.
You see, wasting money is not productive. It's kind of the opposite.
I think you better check your timelines on some of your choice solutions then, because Canonical is never first to the punch for "new solutions".
Snap was an alternative to AppImage for enterprise deployments.
Mir was created in response to Wayland not gaining traction and stagnating for years.
Unity was created because GNOME as a whole fragmented and stagnated, then reformed and got their shit together.
...and so on.
Canonical makes moves as any other for profit entity must in order to keep features moving with sales. They rarely make something specifically for the non-corporate end-user, but we do get some benefits from their work when there is traction in the FOSS community. For instance, Landscape is used by massive companies for desktop deployments, but has almost zero practical purpose for any of us reading here.
Ok, now I have to assume you're trolling.
Look at my comments above, that they're not the first is exactly my point. They re-invent things instead of investing a tenth of the effort in the existing solution and their solutions are worse.
And please don't come with that corporate apologetics. You make it seem like a corporation never makes any errors whatsoever and even the stupidest error isn't just stupidity, but corporate genius we mere mortals just don't understand. That's not the case. Canonical simply is not very good at this.
Yes, maybe they do have some products that do work and are actually better than the competition, but again, actually read my comments and you'll see that I already covered that.
Seriously, are you paid by them?