That's because the distro developers think they stink. Have a search around mailing lists on marc.info and you will see.
Ubuntu represents a very politicised and marketed view of what Linux should look like. You should expect nothing more from Shuttleworth. Everyone else is much more conservative and wants to find a consensus rather than forcing a viewpoint on the world.
Forcing a viewpoint worked for Apple with OSX and iOS and will work for Microsoft with Metro but it won't cut it in a highly divided market with no foot in the door.
Would they add value?
For technical users, when we have an advanced web browser and a terminal at hand, there is no need for the rest of the stuff. It gets in the way.
For business users, they care about consistency. Canonical never delivered that and shows no sign of it.
For end users, the market is owned by Apple, Microsoft and Google.
I'm also not clear as to what Canonical's main target audience is, but I think it's great that finally someone has the balls to stand up and take lead.
PG once said that design is the limiting edge of open source, which seems true empirically. It looks like Mark Shuttleworth recognises this and has led more progress in Linux land recently than anyone else. He's had to pay the price of upsetting some purists, but I'd rather have that than keep acting nice and have Linux play catch up to other operating systems forever.
In fact, I think Canonical has still ended up too conservative by choosing the services business.
Only a proper product business can give Linux a fighting chance in the consumer market. I'm trying to create one.
I disagree. Look at what the GNOME developers did with Gnome-Shell. That was more of a radical change than Unity imho and was equally divisive by "forcing a viewpoint on the world". There are also lots of others doing new and interesting things like KDE with Plasma Active for tablets (on real devices soon via Vivaldi) and Mozilla with the already commercially backed Boot2Gecko project in the mobile space.
Ubuntu represents a very politicised and marketed view of what Linux should look like. You should expect nothing more from Shuttleworth. Everyone else is much more conservative and wants to find a consensus rather than forcing a viewpoint on the world.
Forcing a viewpoint worked for Apple with OSX and iOS and will work for Microsoft with Metro but it won't cut it in a highly divided market with no foot in the door.
Would they add value?
For technical users, when we have an advanced web browser and a terminal at hand, there is no need for the rest of the stuff. It gets in the way.
For business users, they care about consistency. Canonical never delivered that and shows no sign of it.
For end users, the market is owned by Apple, Microsoft and Google.
There is pretty much no place for Unity.