Well the Amazon ads in Ubuntu absolutely did happen, as well as the searches with the super key. [1]
I'll admit it's maybe a bit of an extrapolation to assume that they're as bad as Microsoft, which is why I disclosed that I didn't have a ton of evidence for this.
Well, here are the facts (I was an insider at the time, and this is my testimony).
Searches were anonymized and sent through Canonical servers to provide extended search result sets. This was configurable and could be disabled. Canonical of course had your IP address so they could reply, just like any and every HTTP server does. Your search query was not stored anywhere or aggregated, and it was not associated back to the originating IP address except to reply. Your privacy was respected and protected at all times.
The Amazon search did appear as a plugin in an early prelease. It was never shipped in a released Ubuntu.
The goal was to make things as easy as possible, even for the technically averse (who were still commonplace a decade ago), while still respecting and protecting your privacy.
Of course, no matter what you do, someone is going to scream for everyone to come witness the oppression inherent in the system. We did it anyway with the expectation of baseless knee-jerk outcry and we were not disappointed.
Yeah, fair enough, I'll admit what I said was probably reductive, and if you worked on it you certainly know a lot more than I do; obviously the engineers at Canonical aren't idiots and they're not mustache-twirling supervillains. Just to be clear, I did run Ubuntu on my laptop for quite awhile (for about two years starting immediately after ZFS got integrated support), and I did like it, so I don't mean to suggest it was a terrible product.
I guess I'm just always worried about for-profit companies, because their goal isn't necessarily always aligned with the customer's best interest.
I'm ignorant, doesn't this come "for free" with Qt6 support? Krita is a bit of an exception, because it's still on Qt5, but "core KDE" apps, as released in kde-applications 24.02, are compiled against Qt6 on my arch install.
Well, firstly the team still has to port Krita to Qt 6. That's not trivial because Qt 6 dropped support for Angle and Krita relied on it (especially on Windows where OpenGL drivers aren't the best). So they will need to figure that one out (last I heard they were thinking of manually patching Qt 6 to support Angle again).
Secondarily, Qt 6 still has quite a few bugs (e.g. related to input) that will need fixing or patching so that Krita can use it.
I'm not sure about the origin, but for a while, several EFL developers worked directly for Samsung. It was great (as a previous user of Enlightenment) because development was super active.
Not awful, but not great. I believe multi-monitor support isn't there, and some issues with layers (Firefox can't run natively, for example, but requires xwayland).
In general, I agree, and like using it. But, it's lagged quite a bit regarding Wayland, and still uses some strange components under the hood (acpid instead of logind, connman instead of network manager, etc). I hope it becomes a bit "modernized," where it makes sense.
Connman is okay, it's less featureful than network manager but it's easy to use. I think some Kodi distributions use it, and also available in Debian. Connman, NM and systemd-networkd all strike a different balance (simplicity, server usage, client usage—pick two).
Well, you're choosing the least popular (non-systemd) approach, and also skipping elogind. This stuff JustWorks on systemd based systems, so your blaim is inaccurate.
Where do you think I found out about the necessity to install either of those things in the first place?
If Wayland only JustWorks on systemd-based systems that's not exactly making a great case for it, and this thread has plenty of other downstream stuff that it seems to upend as well.
I'm not trying to make a case for it, it's the simple the truth that systemd has simplified a lot of this behind the scenes work. If you'd prefer to stick to the un-maintained X server because you value your init system more, that's up to you :)
So the largest two desktop environments defaulting to it, popular WMs (sway, etc) getting Wayland versions, PLUS agnostic projects like Firefox, is "zero momentum?" If anything, it's made (sadly) obvious which projects severely lack resources to migrate - the XFCE, enlightenment, gimp, etc. of the world.
GIMP hasn't even migrated to GTK3 yet. The upcoming GIMP 3 will finally use GTK3 and is slated for release in a few months, but this is years after almost everyone else. Certainly in the case of GIMP I think "lack of resources" can be substantiated pretty easily. IIRC GIMP 3 will also get Wayland support – I'd have to check to be sure.
I'm less sure about XFCE or Enlightenment. Judging from [1] the XFCE people have been working on it since Feb 2021 (when that page was created), but real issues still remain, and I'm not surprised that "let's do a substantial rewrite of much of our codebase from something that works perfectly fine to ... something else that works perfectly fine" is not hugely top priority for a fairly small project like this. Call that "people being roadblocks" if you will, but that doesn't strike me as fair. Neither of us get to decide where these people spend their time.
It's not as dire as you think :) Gimp should get Wayland support automatically when they complete the move to Gtk3 (which supports Wayland, Gtk2 does not) and the betas already support Wayland [1]. Enlightenment has clear plans for a Wayland mode [2]. Xfce has stated they'll support it too of course, but it's the largest change they'd be making in decades so it's understandable they're cautious. Maybe the momentum will have people get involved for Xfce, I'm pretty hopeful for all projects.
