It’s Time for Canonical to Stop Protecting Unity

Quoting:I’m still totally in love with OpenSUSE 12.1...

This is where I took the rest with a grain of salt.

Quoting:They [Canonical] eliminate desktop competition.

What? Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xbuntu, Lubuntu. Just because Canonical doesn't finance the development doesn't mean it's dead.

I pretty much didn't read much more.

Before the Novel purchase, SuSE was very supportive of KDE development. Although SuSE featured many DE's in its repositories, it was first and formost a KDE based distro. The connections went further than just featuring KDE as the default. SuSE spent a great deal of time and effort supporting and contributing to KDE development.

Then Novel came along and turned SuSE into a gnome default distro with lots of support for another Novel product, mono.

SuSE was the distro I moved to after slackware. SuSE was slack based, so it was an easy transition back then. Some time in the 7.x release SuSE was getting to bloated for my hardware. I switched to the Next Step (Open Step) DE and that helped for a while. By 9.2 or 9.3 I made the switch to debian. It ran well on my old hardware (333 Mhz AMD 64).

I hope the split from Novel frees up Open SUSE to be a great distro again, but thinking about the Novel days, SUSE users really shouldn't poke fun at Ubuntu and Canonical.

I enjoy Steven Ovadia's work, and I've been featured on his blog, so take this for what it's worth. I'm not at all ready to say "GNOME shell good, Unity bad," nor do I agree that Canonical/Ubuntu is "eliminating desktop competition," by shipping and developing Unity.

I think it's the opposite: Ubuntu is increasing desktop competition by bringing an additional DE to the table.