Ubuntu are playing a (very long) game. If they manage it, IMHO they'll be in a better place than Fedora's UI which is built on a stack that increasingly only Redhat will continue to develop.

I would argue that RedHat is in a better position to do most of the development of the Gnome desktop and Wayland vs Canonical being able to manage the transition to Mir and keep Unity going.

Ubuntu won't need to develop Qt, it has an increasingly vibrant community.

Just like systemd, Wayland and the kernel right ?

Are you aware that Redhat actually employs most of the kernel devs ?

Ubuntu does not have the "people's stack" ... It's just another company building a stack that is not as good.

Are you aware that the whole of the development resource (people) across the entire free software desktop would fit into a reasonable size conference room? Versus, say the size of the development teams on proprietary systems such as Windows?

So, what is the point of trying to divide the community of people all trying to work towards similar(ish) goals - the improvement of the alternative desktops - rather than focusing on how they are part of the same thing? It doesn't improve the likelihood of achieving the goal of a "better" desktop.

You are literally stood in a room with 10 people trying to demonstrate how 2 of them are better than the other 8. It's an exercise in pointlessness, makes the free software community unfriendly and sets up fake academic wars [0].

Note: I previously worked for Canonical so have bias, I know people at RedHat and other open source companies. I have had the opinion that this sort of stupid divisionism stuff is bad for FOSS for at least 10 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law

I apologize if I came off as an ass. I was ticked off by Redhat being painted as the BigBadCo and Canonical being painted as the little-guy-who-could.

I have the greatest of respect for anyone who has ever contributed a single line to Linux - more than anywhere else, your works really impacts countries like India.

I am not sure why there is this impression. I would be lying if I didn't think so myself.

@sandGorgon thanks for apologising, I really appreciate anyone taking a moment to reconsider their underlying assumptions and thinking.

I was specifically talking about the UI. Which is more of a priority for Ubuntu as they are trying to build a desktop OS.