I'm not entirely convinced this is right. Many people worked on Gnome, I'd bet even more did so than did for Unity and Mir. It's not that having more than one project completely divided the FOSS community's resources up.

True, Gnome has had huge development carried out over the last few years. Red Hat / Fedora have been great in terms of contributing to the FOSS community.

I think it's more about the way effort is split. i3 would be an example of good competition, it does something the others don't. Unity on the other hand, does it do anything that couldn't have been done by changing the default gnome configuration? Competition is good but replication is a waste.

I like that quote: competition is good, but replication is a waste. One of the comments below says that Unity was a necessary experiment, and it could have resulted in something amazing. That's very true, and the world has some amazing inventions because somebody wasn't afraid to experiment.

Switched to GNOME means GNOME will have more developers working on it, and developer matters. Compare to tons of full-paid developers in MacOS, Android and Windows.

At the moment, linux still needs more and more High-Quality Desktop Applications.

I kind of agree, sorta.

On one hand, freedom is freedom. You can't say "here have some freedom" then when people do what they want say, "oh I didn't mean that much freedom!"

That said , I think Canonical has a responsibility to do things smarter since they (like it or not) are the face of Linux for a lot of people.

Well said, they need to do things smarter. But I guess that's what they are doing with this decision. They've determined that Unity has failed as a commercial endeavour, and now they're moving to something different. It just so happens (in my opinion) that moving to Gnome will not only be better for Canonical, but also for the broader community.

More important I guess than code contributions to gnome they stopped distributing gnome.

If I am at all representative for early Ubuntu users they themselves might also have lost quite a few enthusiastic fans in the process.

From what I read here they won quite a few enthusiastic users as well so it's not all black and white though.

I'm sure they lost a lot of fans with Unity. They lost even more with the Amazon search debacle. But it's almost certain that they won just as many with both of those changes. I don't really like or dislike Unity. I've used it in the past and been happy enough. Ubuntu did lose a lot of my trust with the Amazon search feature though. My grandmother used to say "trust is hard won, and easily lost".

While I agree that there are, in fact, way too many distros and desktops in the Linux space, I disagree with the sense that Ubuntu did damage towards a goal of fewer choices. Just because Gnome is there doesn't mean it's ultimately the best software for the job and sure they likely could have driven a lot of improvements to it but sometimes there needs to be experimentation. If Unity was more popular and found its way to more distros then maybe we'd even seen it go the other way and Gnome would die thus still working towards the goal of fewer choices.

I think it's important for experimentation to occur. Don't contribute to the incumbents only because you want the fewest opinions available.

I agree completely that experimentation needs to occur. I definitely don't begrudge them for making the decision to implement Unity.

My initial thoughts were more hypothetical - and I definitely wouldn't suggest that Gnome is the best software/DE around!

If we take Linux Mint for example - they've gone out on their own with custom/forked versions of simple things like XEd, XPlayer, XReader. That isn't experimentation, it's just a difference of product development philosophy. I'm not saying we should all be clones and all use the same software, but at what point do we say "ok, there are 57 text editors out there, let's work with one of them to improve that feature set rather than go out on our own with the 58th editor". Surely the hours of development going in to these "X" apps would be better spent contributing back to something that everybody can use and is already using.

I think for me it all comes back to a deeper philosophical and moral issue - why can't we all just get along and work together on shared solutions.

I feel like this is a relevant quote: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

As I see it, you are talking more about exposure than choice. I agree having GNOME on the spotlights will draw people to it and stuff will get fixed and possibly better. Never liked Unity but didn't use it ever either.

And having defaults doesn't imply a lack of choice IMO. It is still easy to change DEs on a vanilla Ubuntu as it should be. I don't bother with the variants, I just install vanilla Ubuntu and install my DE of choice in place.

All true. We're all free to install any DE environment we want. But defaults are definitely useful to the entry level Linux users. I would love to see the day when the first (and easiest) choice for Joe Dad and Mary Mum setting up a computer for themselves and their kids is Linux with an easy to use DE instead of Win10/MacOS, with defaults that include LibreOffice instead of Pages/Office365, Firefox instead of Safari/Edge, and more.

Yes, many distros offer this out of the box right now, but it's not at the forefront of Joe-average's mind, because it's still not easy enough.

I just think that if there was less fragmentation (see my Linux Mint XEd example above), we could make much faster progress toward a FOSS world for the average user. Note, I'm talking about less fragmentation - not zero fragmentation.