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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: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:08AM (3 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:08AM (#489561) Homepage

    Is it just me that couldn't care WHAT I'm running.

    All I ask is that whatever is running is customisable enough that I just don't care what it actually is. Like turning off top-line menus, and left-hand-sidebars and shite like that.

    Historically, I would always prefer KDE because it let me do that. Then I got shifted to Gnome because the tables turned. At one point, I switched from Slackware on servers (control) and Ubuntu on desktop (ease of use) to the complete flip of that. Now all the large modern desktop environments are emulating the UI-disaster that was new Windows. The niche ones get it - keep it minimal, out of my way, and let me just run my programs.

    Honestly, just go and look at Classic Shell. It restores to Windows what Microsoft took away. For free. Inherently customisable. Gets rid of unrelated junk (Metro, etc.). Let's me work the way I like (old-fashion alphabetical start menu, searchable fancy transparent menu, any combination thereof).

    I really don't care what I run now. So long as I can turn it off, hide the bits I don't care about, move the bits I do care about and generally get it the hell out of my way.

    If you don't get that a UI is about what you DON'T have to see, rather than what you do get blatted in your face as large primary-coloured boxes, you shouldn't be let anywhere near it.

    I don't know what's happened, but since the latest generation of UI designers graduated from whatever community college is it they took the human interface course at, every interface I see has started to turn to shite. It's like none of the people involved uses them day-in-day-out, so they just slapped something together that was "new and interesting" and forgot that people actually work differently, and need to be able to work.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:50PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:50PM (#489676)

    I think the "splashy color" problem is largely a result of companies attempting to unify UI across a variety of platforms (computers, phones, tablets). The problem is that phones and tablet interfaces and use cases don't lend themselves to the type of configurability that power users on computers want and need.

    • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:27PM

      by chewbacon (1032) on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:27PM (#489738)

      I think that was the point of unity: ubuntu tablet, phone, and one cohesive experience. All the cool kids at Apple were doing it!

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Friday April 07 2017, @07:35AM

      by ledow (5567) on Friday April 07 2017, @07:35AM (#490116) Homepage

      Then you LET PEOPLE CHANGE THINGS.

      Maybe someone prefers a touch interface because they use all-touch devices.
      Maybe someone else doesn't.
      Maybe someone else wants a compromise of a large-button-but-traditional-look desktop because they use so many differing devices.
      Maybe someone has hand trouble on their large-screen PC and still needs large touch interfaces on there.
      Maybe someone else can't use the touch interface at all and you can't navigate it with a trackball.

      If you make it all OPTIONAL, then people can choose the options they want. And you already had all the old interfaces, and had to code all the new interfaces, so presenting both in the same codebase with an option is quite easy.

      But no, "designers know better" than users, apparently.