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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: 5, Insightful) by Zyx Abacab on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:24AM (9 children)
It really sucks that KDE seems to get no mindshare. I mean, the whole KDE4 debacle was pretty bad—and it drove away lots of users, including me—but those were minor compared to the bullshit Gnome 3 pulled.
I mean, things have gotten a lot better since then. KDE5 a perfectly good, modern desktop environment...but everyone is always arguing about Gnome, MATE and Unity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:44AM
I'm a huge KDE5 convert.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:19AM (1 child)
...things have gotten a lot better since then. KDE5 a perfectly good, modern desktop environment...
Is it as good (ie fast and configurable) as KDE 3.5? Serious question - I'm trying to work out how much effort I need to put into getting Trinity going.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Thursday April 06 2017, @09:48AM
In my opinion, it is. It's still not quite as stable, but I think all else has caught up. I generally use the latest Kubuntu for work and home machines and the only thing I still notice is that plasma will still crash every once in a while with dual monitors when coming out of power saving. Mind you, this is a fairly quiet crash where it starts up again and just tells you it crashed, but a crash all the same. One of these machines has an NVidia Optimus 2 card setup, and the other has a single NVidia card, so there may be a correlation. I have a little ultrabook that doesn't see these problems, but I really don't push it very hard. I may have seen a very occasional Plasma restart on it as well, so it may be unrelated. Not a difficult thing to deal with regardless.
I actually switched to using KMail and a few of the KDE apps as well, as I kept hitting problem in Thunderbird that I couldn't work around. I'm pretty happy with it and the other applications like the scheduler as well.
I'm not even a big Gnome 3 hater, but I definitely think KDE is superior.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:48AM
Well, if neither Mate nor Cinnamon had happened, I might have tried KDE. But when I have two desktop environments that are good enough without requiring me to relearn everything, then why should I switch? Especially since for both projects, due to their history, I don't expect them to make any radical changes in the foreseeable future, while I wouldn't bet on that for KDE.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Thursday April 06 2017, @09:59AM (1 child)
...but everyone is always arguing about Gnome, MATE and Unity.
And then they go to Cinnamon and no longer worry about Desktop Environment holy wars. ;-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Taibhsear on Thursday April 06 2017, @03:58PM
I wasn't super upset about gnome 3 but unity was a garbage fire. It was basically the main reason I switched over to Mint. MATE I thought was a nice compromise but then I tried Cinnamon and in my opinion it is greatly superior to the others (from a user perspective at the very least).
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday April 06 2017, @03:04PM (2 children)
From KDE5 homepage, "KDE uses cookies on our website to help make it better for you. If you would like to learn more, or opt out of this feature: click here"
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 06 2017, @04:11PM
So?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Zyx Abacab on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:14PM
You are aware that SoylentNewsuses cookies too, right?
Cookies aren't some categorically evil thing. And KDE e.V., the non-profit behind KDE, is based in Germany—a country with strong laws covering browser cookies.
On top of that, they even let you opt out of the cookies, if you so want!