I'll openly admit that I'm a Free Software zealot, but Mark's characterisation of zealotry doesn't quite apply to my way of thinking:

> When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too.

I hate on, and have no respect for, Windows for precisely one reason: it's proprietary. My zealotry is so fierce, that I don't consider Windows to do anything well; because whatever it does, it does unethically. Of course, I acknowledge that if we ignore the ethics, then it may have some good solutions to various things, but I consider the ethics to be so important that there's no way for any other aspect to make up for it. I basically consider Windows to be a fancy tech demo, like Duke Nukem Forever, which so far has still failed to ship anything useful (where "shipping something useful" == "contributing software to the public good").

On the other hand, Canonical have shipped an awful lot of useful stuff, which I respect them for. They've also shipped stuff that I may not find useful, but still thank them for. They've also failed to ship some stuff too, like the server software for UbuntuOne, which remained in the tech demo stage (i.e. proprietary) until it was discontinued.

My opinion of Canonical has never depended on whether they're "mainstream".

> The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. F* that s.

iOS is only a tech preview, so I'll focus on Android.

Android ships a fair amount of stuff, which I respect. I understand that many copies of Android also throw some unethical components into the mix too, which is a shame. It's also a shame that many mobile phone manufacturers are shipping tech previews rather than user-controlled general-purpose computers.

Based on my own usage of Android (I built it from git for my OpenMoko in 2008), it was nice but sluggish. The fact it exists at all is enough to satisfy my ethical concerns about FOSS mobile software: whether or not it gets bundled with proprietary stuff, on crippled remotely-operated spying devices, is a different (but important!) concern that may or may not benefit from competition. On desktops we have Linux, the BSDs, Haiku, FreeDOS, etc. yet many machines still come bundled with Windows and OS X; having many FOSS options didn't neccessarily help FOSS adoption.

Regarding Unity: I see the point of it, as a very user-visible way for Canonical to differentiate themselves from being a "mere vendor" (like, say, Debian). Yes, it's "non-standard", but that's part of the point. I don't actually use it, or GNOME, XFCE, etc. (I use xmonad with no DE) but I've run across it and didn't have any problems.

As for Mir, it could* be a differentiating factor, but it's mostly hidden from the user. It's one of those situations where nobody notices it unless it goes wrong. The same goes for Wayland, and Xorg. For that reason, it's probably better to pool resources into a common, "works everywhere" graphics implementation. Wayland seems to have won the developer mindshare at this point.