When last I used the Unity shell, it was clearly not ready for prime time. I'll spend some time later today, cross my fingers, and discover if that has changed or not. There's much more in a new release than just that, but the supposedly-cleaned up Unity will probably get most of the press.
Some concerns aside, I respect a lot of the chutzpah that Canonical is showing: Unity, Wayland, trying to force KDE/GNOME to work together on a notification API. They want to see the Linux desktop improve, and even if people fight against them and they lose, to me it feels better than the inertia of the status quo. Stasis gets no one anywhere.
Canonical have nothing to do with Wayland. Mark Shuttleworth wrote a blog post saying they wanted to use it (in a ridiculously unrealistic timeframe), but they've contributed nothing to meeting that goal.
They haven't tried to "force KDE/GNOME to work together on a notification API". They did their own thing, then later on adopted and modified a KDE protocol (which in the first place didn't even do the primary thing they were aiming for -> menus), then complained about GNOME not adopting their code (which is a separate issue to the protocol).
They're basically doing their own thing now, not paying a lot of attention (let alone contributing) to upstream projects.
I'm not going to join in, but I have trouble reconciling the arguments "GNOME not adopting their code/protocol" and "not contributing to upstream projects".
GNOME rejected the libappindicator code and approach (largely because it was irrelevant and badly timed), but not the StatusNotifier protocol (as defined mostly by KDE, then once modified, the basis for libappindicator).
The "not contributing to upstream" comment has a much broader context than that particular issue though. One late attempt to push something fairly irrelevant upstream does not define the entire context for their engagement. :-)
Some concerns aside, I respect a lot of the chutzpah that Canonical is showing: Unity, Wayland, trying to force KDE/GNOME to work together on a notification API. They want to see the Linux desktop improve, and even if people fight against them and they lose, to me it feels better than the inertia of the status quo. Stasis gets no one anywhere.