Yeah, I can understand how that's confusing. I meant to convey two things:
1. I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy, and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place.
2. In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use Unity and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the rug out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing.
This behavior reminds me of MS forcing Metro UI on people in Windows 8 for years and then (mostly) abandoning it without ceremony in Win 10. I don't expect MS to care about anything other than the bottom line, but I had hoped for more from Canonical.
>"I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy, and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place."
So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should continue on making that same mistake regardless?
>"In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use Unity and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the rug out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing."
If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.
> So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should continue on making that same mistake regardless?
Doesn't sound to me like Canonical is admitting a mistake. Quote from OP:
"This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and the product, both of which are amazing." (emphasis added)
My point is that Canonical's behavior, both in 2010 and now, is bad corporate citizenship. They're showing very little regard for their users and their community.
> If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.
Honestly, I hope that doesn't happen. If convergence and Ubuntu Phone aren't happening, I'd rather see the resources go into other DEs that already have a strong community like KDE, GNOME, or MATE.
I'm happy they are dropping it, but disappointed that they started altogether. That's a lot of time we as a community could have been working together, but weren't. I can be disappointed in those "lost" years, but happy that we're done with them.
Shouldn't you be happy rather than disappointed?