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Moving Away From Ubuntu

 

Hi all,

Some time ago, I have noticed that an app I'm developing had
some rendering issues only when the Ubuntu overlay scrollbars
were being used. When I took this to Ubuntu developers, I was
told that my best chance was to patch the scrollbars myself
because no one was currently working on them.

This is a symptom of something that, for anyone who's been
following the Ubuntu developer community, should be quite
evident at this point: due to the move to QML and touch, GTK
and the rest of the stack Ubuntu had been using will now be
second-class citizens, and it is only a matter of time before
this change of status starts to gradually creep into overall
stability and speed of fixing bugs.

This wouldn't be much of a problem if Ubuntu simply packaged
and shipped a vanilla GNOME stack, but the problem is that
they ship a patched stack mixed with unpolished Ayatana
projects which might now never get any more polish. And this
might get worse with the move to Mir, as Canonical will probably
need to add and maintain Mir support to GTK by itself.

My intention here is not to question any direction Canonical
is taking, but to question how much it still makes sense to
build elementary on top of Ubuntu instead of a distro that
uses a more vanilla GNOME stack or at least one that still
treats it as a first-class citizen.

It might be a good time to have a serious discussion on this.




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