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Ars Technica reports that Unity, Ubuntu's controversial self-developed desktop environment, is no more.
Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops, Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME next year. Canonical is also ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, spelling doom for the goal of creating a converged experience with phones acting as desktops when docked with the right equipment.
Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical posted online about the change to, as he put it, "Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, rather than Phone and convergence":
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.
[...] I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts.
Some love Unity; for others, it never caught on. Will it be missed, nostalgically and/or technologically?
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(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:33AM (6 children)
Someone confirmed to ars that this also means they are dropping Mir, as there is no longer any reason to not switch to wayland.
I guess that is the good aspect of this. Unity was not so bad, but doing their own alternative display server was silly.
(Score: 1) by snmygos on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:51AM (1 child)
It is very good if there is less fragmentation in Linux. I never tried Unity, I use Cinnamon for years, but this will help to build the Ubuntu based version of Mint, if the original is more standard.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:48PM
It's good for standardizing on Wayland. It's not so great for the DE landscape though, because Gnome3 is an abomination. I wish they'd pick something else. They should have gone with KDE, and made a custom skin/theme for it, or even a custom version of Plasma. Then they would have had full software compatibility with the rest of Linux-land, while still being able to have their own unique UI. Instead, they'll just be yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, looking exactly like all the others, with Gnome3's horrible minimalist UI. There's a good reason that Gnome3 caused not one, but two serious forks (Cinnamon and MATE), something that I don't believe has ever been paralleled in FOSS history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:29AM (1 child)
Mir de-orbited long ago...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @11:54AM
Mir de-orbited long ago...
True, but due to its dependency on systemd it suffered a system hang while writing its binary log files and is just crashing now.
(Score: 2) by letssee on Thursday April 06 2017, @07:19AM
Amen to that! I'll miss unity, I rathe rliked it. But there are alternatovis for unity. The whole mir debacle was a serious hindrance to getting the graphics stack on linux modernized. Wayland seems way better thought out than mir, and splitting the effort over 2 display servers was a shame. Also the whole mobile phone idea was dead on arrival, so it was basically a waste of time (sadly, I'd love a non-android linux phone which actually works well).
Sadly their announcement that they're concentrating on cloud and iot looks like they still don't (or can't, financially) do what they're ( or were) best at: creating a working desktop linux. I tried snappy core and found it to be a rather hostile environment, but maybe I'd need to actually learn how snappy works (sigh, re-learn everyting *again* )
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:40AM
Indeed, dropping Mir is the more important thing. It is easy to change desktop environments, and in most cases programs work well even if started from a different desktop environment than the one they are written for. However having two incompatible graphics systems is a bigger issue.