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I opened that post. The top comment asks for mixed DPI, trackpad gestures, and better power management. I had to scan (and click the next page thing) quite a lot to get to something that looked vaguely critical of Unity (and even then it was "collaborate with Gnome more"). I wish they took the other suggestions as seriously…

Unity was entirely pointless though.



Unity was not pointless.

The point was that Microsoft was threatening to sue any company distributing a Windows-like desktop Linux.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/20/microsoft_claims_linu...

SUSE signed a patent-sharing agreement; Red Hat and Canonical said no.

Both developed their own non-Windows-like desktops. RH sponsors GNOME, and many RH people worked on GNOME 3.

Canonical tried to get involved and was rebuffed. E.g. https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/tag/gnome

So it rebuilt its existing "Netbook Launcher" as a general-purpose desktop.

MS didn't sue anyone in the end, but it got what it wanted: massive fragmentation in the Linux world, no harmony, lots of split and duplicated effort.

My analysis, from a decade ago, is here: https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_l...




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