Hello - just stumbled over that somewhat stunning news:
This is a post by Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical
We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it’s appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Damn. I know a vast majority of Linux people hated Unity. But some people still liked it. For them, this is equivalent to being Leia watching the Death Star blowing up her planet.
Also, what will happen to Ubuntu Gnome? Will they just merge to be one, or will their be differences in place and each one focusing on their own ideas.
It actually makes a lot of sense, and his reasoning makes sense as well. They had a goal but it didn't go in the direction they had hoped instead created fragmentation, they realised that and changed.
They are talented people, what I hope, is that they will continue to invest development on the desktop and work with Red Hat, and the GNOME developers to further GNOME. It would be a shame if they didn't.
I actually liked Unity 7. It was different and slowly evolved into a good environment, but I realize that I was in the minority. I'm not entirely surprised. This is an interview with Mark Shuttleworth a couple of months ago.
Isn't it time to face reality and move on? If weeks spent in software development are like dog years on delivery, what are years? Surely, if Shuttleworth giveth the time Shuttleworth can taketh away.
"It may be my white whale," he admits. "I feel the team has earned a fair shot and I may take my carrots."
maybe im interested on how they will handle this with ubuntu gnome and just plain ubuntu im guessing they will just have plain ubuntu with out a ubuntu gnome 18.04 and then just contribute to gnome from then on which is exciting since alot of stuff will be advanced alot quicker
This saddened me. I actually like Unity. It just wasn't my cup of tea.
My son likes it. The only thing that bothers me with Unity is the Dock.
My son was able to pick it up within minutes and use it quite well. And my wife looked at Ubuntu and said she liked it better than her desktop for Ubuntu Mate.
I haven't the heart to tell her there's an option in Mate Tweak to make it look like Unity called Munity.
Thats good news indeed. I personally never really saw the whole point of the Unity concept tbh. In my opinion from a userbility standpoint, Unity isnt that fundamently diffrent from Gnome. Its just that Unitiy on itself is even more locked down then plain Gnome.
Thats one of the reasons why i dont like plain Gnome either. in my opinion the way Gnome is heading with taking more and more feutures out of it, is really annoying. its just rediculous that i need to use tweaktools and plugins, to get some of the traditional basic functionalities from a desktop operating system back. I mean take the nautilis file manager as an example, it was a great file manager, but Gnome has stripped manny base feutures out of it. And that is just really awfull imo. These are just small iritations i have about Gnome.
Never the less i think that if its true that Ubuntu abandon's Unity. I would be good news for manny Ubuntu Gnome fans out there.
Which I don't see as a problem yet - what realy angers me is that they remove stuff from gtk+ so that there is no way of actually tweaking it anymore - the icons in dropdown menues for example - why on earth anyone in the right mind would not want them...
120% true - that's realy an awful piece they delivered - so glad that with foss there will always be forks and thus alternatives <3
Well yeah everyone has their own opinions on DE's they like. Its of course great that there are still manny people developing tools and plugins to tweak the Gnome desktop. But to me its frustrating to see more and more feutures getting stripped out.
I think that Cannonical´s original idea behind Unity was to creat their own proprietary Linux OS. On which they seem to have failed. The theming on recent versions of Ubuntu has been a mess an very incosistant, and they didnt seem to have the developers to fix bugs and niggles with Unity. So i think that ditching Unity for something with a more sollid base like Gnome is the best choice for them.
This is good news! I think Gnome will lend itself to a better phone environment that can seamlessly integrate with the desktop. I don't believe they will be dominating either of those areas any time soon, but the work being done here could lead to more Linux adoption in a different place - set top boxes.
The types of interfaces used on phones are very well adapted to set top boxes connected to TV's- the so-called "ten foot user interface". This is likely one reason why Android seems to be quite popular with smart TV's and set top boxes. Many of the set top boxes use ARM processors which can run Linux, and save for some driver and boot loader issues, they can run the same types of distros that their SOC counterparts can run.
I think Linux can be used very well as an HTPC OS. I'm using it that way as I type, and have for a little over 2 years now. LXDE is far from the optimal DE for such a task, but it is malleable enough to work well for me. It took me doing things that I thought I would hate and be uncomfortable with before I realized how much I really like it! I guess that same notion has applied to quite a few things in life, particularly revolving around computers.
I haven't used Gnome in a while, and I know it can be made to do vastly different things depending on how it is modified. This change from Ubuntu should bring a lot of positive influence over time. I would love to have a Linux OS on a tablet and HTPC that is seamless and fits well with the way I currently use my system.
