This is nowhere near the historical truth. The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project. Those were cancelled several years (2017) after the Ubuntu Edge as a result of a business decision to make the company more profitable for investors. There is zero money in desktop, and Canonical continues supporting Ubuntu only as enabling technology for their server and IoT product lines.
> The Ubuntu Edge (2013) had no effect on the Unity project or on the OS convergence project.
The failure of Ubuntu Edge to meet its lofty ($32M) crowdfunding target did not immediately result in Canonical abandoning their convergence aspirations. But it was part of a broader trend of failed attempts to monetize mobile and desktop users. Had more those attempts been sufficiently successful I doubt they would have abandoned OS convergence.
Nowhere near you say? Mir and Unity 8 dev were put on the back burner not long after the Edge campaign. Remeber that no release with them was ever made. Formally terminating dev work a few years later seems to fit in very well: there suddenly was no need for Mir, and the shift in focus to the server fits well with dropping a custom DE.
Mir is still a product that Canonical ships and supports. The converged desktop/phone project was cancelled 4 years (many "not longs" in move-fast-and-break-things timescales) after the Edge proposal was cancelled and really really had nothing to do with the Edge proposal.
I know and understand that I'm an insider with actual information and facts but the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet is not enough to change the experience I had when I was there.
> the strongly-help uninformed opinion of randos on the internet
Funny, based on my inside info you look to be one :) Maybe should shouldn't assume so much, since you are obviously keenly aware of of how one might look on the web.
It was amusing to read @bregma's comments here, because they said what I was thinking at each point.
The dates are a matter of public record, and trivially Googled. It is not "insider knowledge" to have a memory.
The phone flopped in 2014; the desktop and convergence projects weren't cancelled until the HN thread four years later.
IMHO as a Unity user, the phone deserved to flop. It offered no new compelling features. If it had had some big-ticket selling point, like a slide-out hardware keyboard -- something that used to be a widespread feature in smartphones before the iPhone -- then I would have backed it. I did back the Planet Computers Gemini and I have one. It's a lovely device.
But it didn't. To conflate these things is entirely bogus.
Amusing that you seem to have ignored to read other comments. And that you missed their contradiction: mir was formally cancelled (as if there was nothing between the phone and that) 4 years later and is still on shipping.
