>I am astonished at what a short memory HN has.

I remember this events too, probably HN hate was not the main reason but probably it was the final straw.

Then you see some dudes ehre hating on snap, dudes calm down, your fucking flatpacks are not equivalent, they are GNOME/desktop centric, can't use them on a server.

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...