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posted by on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the translation:-we-aren't-making-money-from-the-ads-anymore dept.

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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:30AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:30AM (#489529)

    ...it was a big 'fuck you' to the Gnome devs; which makes this announcement feel more like a defeat. Unity was launched in response to Gnome unleashing Gnome Shell and breaking a bunch of historically stable APIs. Canonical tried to work with them but the Gnome team wasn't interested. So while it's sad to see one less choice in the desktop space, the move back to Gnome really makes it sting.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Chromium_One on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:58AM (2 children)

    by Chromium_One (4574) on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:58AM (#489537)

    Would have been interesting to see this played out with 'buntu having decided to do something like XFCE+TheirStuff instead of doing Unity. Also, Mir was always a distraction, and I didn't get it.

    --
    When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @12:41PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @12:41PM (#489625)

      Agreed, Unity is a resource pig. On all of my older systems I've switched to the XFCE desktop and am perfectly happy. Systems that appear to be ready for the trash heap with the unity desktop, suddenly run like spry young computers again. XFCE is like the fountain of youth for aging computers.

      • (Score: 2) by Chromium_One on Friday April 07 2017, @01:15AM

        by Chromium_One (4574) on Friday April 07 2017, @01:15AM (#489976)

        Unity is a pig, but it's mostly the compositing layer that screws everything up. Turn that off and it's ... well, less of a pig.

        --
        When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.