I agree with you on those projects and Mint, my only response is that they are all much smaller projects that lack the funding and size/force of will that Ubuntu was able to achieve. That isn’t to take away from them at all, but aside from System 76 (a boutique reseller who until recently has primarily just sold re-badged Taiwanese laptops (good laptops to be sure, Clevo is a solid ODM), most of them are either largely community projects or very nascent businesses with a few full-time employees.

Again, that isn’t a criticism — I’m friends with some members of the elementary team and absolutely love what they do — truly. But none of those projects can make the type of investment that Canonical did or that the other big Linux vendors who have all but abandoned the desktop (SuSE/Novell, Red Hat) did, or even now-bankrupt/sold for pennies to PE companies did (Mandriva (née Mandrake), Corel, Linspire (remember those crooks!)) or that some promised to do, but later abandoned (Steam).

Maybe that’s OK. Maybe the number of Linux desktop users is content with work being done and sustained largely by community volunteers or very small companies. But as good as the work many of those groups do is, I do think the lack of a Canonical type of company does hurt the whole ecosystems ability to grow, innovate, and reliably attract new users. On a personal level, I think that everyone should give up the pretense of Linux on the desktop ever evolving beyond an extremely niche thing, and be content that the Linux kernel is at least the basis for stuff like ChromeOS and Android (which while absolutely not Linux on the desktop or on mobile, are at least major desktop platforms), but that’s just me.

Deepin is interesting because it has a strong source of funding and developers/partners and has made really great moves on the UI front and it’s partnerships with ZTE and Huawei (Huawei even ships Deepin on many of its machines now). My personal concern with Deepin is the security and privacy with it — and I have those same concerns for any state-sponsored version of Linux or any operating system to be honest. Deepin is also very insular in its development (far more than even Ubuntu), and that might just be necessary to achieve the sort of polish it has, but that distinct lack of community could be a turn-off to many.

What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily disagree with your assertion that Canonical should pull out from the desktop even more, but I think a lot of people underestimate just how big of a void that will leave in the desktop space and as good as those projects you mentioned are, I don’t think any of them individually or collectively can fill it. Especially financially.