Having read only the summary, I'm still happy to have an opinion: Swift maintainers, so far you show excellent judgement!

I've developed games on Unreal and Unity (and bare metal etc). They have different pro/con (personally I prefer Unity). With Unreal you need hardcore coders and multi-platform targeting is hard. I think of it as the good, ol'-fashioned AAA big budget approach. Unity has quirkier graphics pipeline and some odd asset management things (works best with smaller teams), but it is incredibly easy to do basic behavioral scripting, there's a big on-line community driving their asset store, and cross platform delivery really works.

imo the real story behind the Unreal licensing change is that Unity has been crushing Unreal for marketshare in mobile game dev. Unreal had to do something radical or they were going to end up powering only some big AAA projects. "retreat upwards" is not a sustainable business strategy.

I certainly would like to see both companies healthy and pushing the platforms forward so I hopes this gives Unreal a boost.

I certainly agree the desktop is the most important part, at least for adoption and market share. The problem is that Unity is a terrible UX and much worse than what it replaces. I thought pre-Unity Ubuntu was pretty good; not great but competitive. In fact I have a Ubuntu desktop that all my family shares as an alternate to Windows, pre-Unity even my 10 year daughter was fine using it. But when they switched to Unity it became much harder to use, especially for folks who were trying to use it as an alternative to Windows, Mac and prior Linux desktops.

I saw a different thread recently (lost the URL, sorry) pointing out that Microsoft is making a similar UI design error on Windows 8, i.e. they are trying to repurpose a mature mouse-focused UX to become good at tablet touch interface also. As we have all heard Win8 is also is unsuccessful. So it is a shame that Ubuntu has abandoned focusing on a high quality mouse-driven UX, because if that was available during Win8 launch for first time desktop Linux would be well positioned to pick up market share from Windows.

I have developed apps for lots of UIs over the years (web, PC, Mac, various X variants, and lots of mobile including Palm OS, iOS and Android). You can't just re-skin widgets to make a UI work for both touch and mouse. They are functionally different UX that require a deeper UI abstraction via MVC or similar.

Focus Fusion Society http://focusfusion.org/ is posting research on their project to do aneutronic e.g. Proton Boron (pB11) fusion. The concept sounds great, and as an engineer several parts of their design such as direct extraction of electric power are elegant. Is this credible research or pie-in-the-sky? I have not seen much mention in mainstream fusion research.