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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?
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 06 2017, @03:30PM (7 children)
Although switching to Gnome 3 is a little like saying "Herpes sucks, we're moving to syphilis," as others have pointed out, this will free up a lot of developer time for maybe making Gnome 3 and Wayland not suck. I'll stay on Xfce for now, use Plasma if I can figure out what keeps making kactivitymanagerd crash (harmlessly?) on login, but Gnome has lost me.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:57PM (6 children)
this will free up a lot of developer time for maybe making Gnome 3 and Wayland not suck.
Sorry, but that's impossible for Gnome 3. Even if you do make it not suck somehow, the Gnome devs are NOT going to accept your patches, so you're effectively forking it. You might as well just jump ship to Cinnamon. Canonical's patches to that would most likely be accepted.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:07PM (5 children)
Sad, that :( WTF happened to Gnome anyway? I remember liking it in the 2.x days. Then 3.0 came along and it all went to hell. Now it looks like a cross between an iPad and those cheesy 60s sci-fi spaceships built out of plastic panelling on the inside. Something went very wrong when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
Compositing Window Managers...
With Compiz at the front.
At that point UX designers took over and teamed up with the developers that wanted to play with OpenGL, not X11.
The culmination of that is what we are seeing going on with Wayland, where the OpenGL fueled "compositor" (see WM) is king.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:40PM
comp!z utterly and completly f#cked over m$ and apple.
instead of a decade long roll out of new desktop effects probably going over windows ver 7 to 23
compiz happend overnight and opensource.
my secret paranoia is that gnom3 and kde4 were insider sabotage paid for by m$ because comp!z
wiped out some potentiel billions in "upgrade and new feature profits".
many a people pluged into the m$ matrix got lured enough by youtube videos demoing comp!z to give the matrix busting linux a chance to live on their harddisks.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 07 2017, @01:08AM (2 children)
In 2011, it was said that Cinnamon was intended to resemble GNOME 2.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/cinnamon-alternative-for-gnome-shell/ [maketecheasier.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday April 07 2017, @01:29AM (1 child)
Yup. and there's Mate and Xfce, which frankly is what Gnome 2.x always should have been.
I figured out the Plasma crash; my git build of qtcurve is the problem apparently. Plasma 5.9 may be the best KDE release since 3.5.10 and that is a *very* high bar for me; it's the first one that made me stop pining for TDE ebuilds/overlays!
So looks like Plasma may replace Xfce if they insist on going GTK3...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 07 2017, @01:49AM
LXQt doesn't have any GTK+ 3 in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXQt [wikipedia.org]
It's claimed to use less memory than Xfce.
https://blog.lxde.org/2016/10/04/benchmark-memory-usage-lxqt-desktop-environment-vs-xfce/ [lxde.org]