https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972
HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice.
I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity.
And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes.
After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it.
But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I "use" the touchscreen option only inadvertently.
The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.