Shake it off

I’m surprised at my own reaction to the news of the demise of the Unity desktop. When I read the news, all I could think was: let the whole Ubuntu thing go the way of Unity!

I first came to Linux through Ubuntu, more than a decade ago, and was very pleased with it… until it stopped working. Suddenly I couldn’t get my system to carry out many of the tasks it had previously done so easily. I was eventually able to move to Linux Mint with the MATE desktop and later to Linux Mint Debian Edition and SparkyLinux.

While Ubuntu brought me to Linux, I felt so badly deceived when it abandoned me for Unity that I’ve sustained a longstanding dislike of the whole Ubuntu project. Suddenly, with news of the demise of Unity, an amazing amount of anti-Ubuntu emotion swelled inside me. Let it fail! Obviously, the very strong feeling of betrayal by Ubuntu persists. Michael Cleary, Sydney, Australia,

Neil says: Humans do seem to get awfully emotional when it comes to lumps of silicon and the ones and zeros that they run. Personally, I can’t see why anyone would want one open source project to succeed over another, nevermind it dying into obscurity. There’s the notion it could be taking developer talent away from “more worthy” projects, but would it be really? They’d likely just work on something else. As the indomitable Taylor Swift says, haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.