Unity 8 Desktop Still Planned In Time For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unity 8 Desktop Still Planned In Time For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

While much of Canonical's recent focus has been about reading Unity 8 for mobile devices, their plan is still to ship Unity 8 by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop ahead of its next LTS release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgxNDM

[Alejandro Nova]

Looks like everything is rolling out like we foresaw. By 2016 GNOME and KDE will have MATURE Wayland solutions, with lots of native Wayland apps. Mir won't have anything like that by that date.

[rikkinho]

Looks like everything is rolling out like we foresaw. By 2016 GNOME and KDE will have MATURE Wayland solutions, with lots of native Wayland apps. Mir won't have anything like that by that date.

?? you read the same article? ubuntu 16.04 will be mir

[FiXIDeA]

Ubuntu Time...

[Alejandro Nova]

?? you read the same article? ubuntu 16.04 will be mir

Yep, read the article. Yep, Ubuntu 16.04 will be Mir. No, it won't be nearly as mature as Wayland.

[Delgarde]

?? you read the same article? ubuntu 16.04 will be mir

Yes, that's kind of the point. Ubuntu are planning that 16.04 will be the first release using Mir, about eighteen months from now.

By contrast, Fedora are shipping Gnome/Wayland as a preview this year, and will likely be making it the default in one of their 2015 releases. OpenSUSE are a little further behind, but are likewise aiming for a Wayland-based release sometime 2015. Ubuntu... not until the following year.

[johnc]

Yes, that's kind of the point. Ubuntu are planning that 16.04 will be the first release using Mir, about eighteen months from now.

By contrast, Fedora are shipping Gnome/Wayland as a preview this year, and will likely be making it the default in one of their 2015 releases. OpenSUSE are a little further behind, but are likewise aiming for a Wayland-based release sometime 2015. Ubuntu... not until the following year.

In fairness there's a lot more going on there than just Mir. They're basically re-writing the desktop in Qt and removing all the GNOME crap.

At least that's my understanding.

[Delgarde]

In fairness there's a lot more going on there than just Mir. They're basically re-writing the desktop in Qt and removing all the GNOME crap.

At least that's my understanding.

Perhaps, but if so, I can't say I'm impressed by their organisational abilities... they had well-publicised plans to make Mir the default in 13.10, before backing off after realising how far away they still were. So rather than fix the issues and get it shipped, they've distracted themselves with a desktop rewrite, and pushed it back a few more years.

By which time other distros will have been shipping Wayland as standard for at least six months, maybe a year. And confronted by that reality, is Canonical really going to stick with Mir all the way to release? Or are they going to decide there's no point in continuing down that path, and spend another year or two porting Unity to Wayland?

[madjr]

Yes, that's kind of the point. Ubuntu are planning that 16.04 will be the first release using Mir, about eighteen months from now.

By contrast, Fedora are shipping Gnome/Wayland as a preview this year, and will likely be making it the default in one of their 2015 releases. OpenSUSE are a little further behind, but are likewise aiming for a Wayland-based release sometime 2015. Ubuntu... not until the following year.

I think you should not read just the summaries and go directly to the blog post:

http://mhall119.com/2014/10/unity-8-desktop/

"We learned some lessons during the early development of Unity 7. Here’s what happened:

11.04: New Unity as default
11.10: New Unity version
12.04: Unity in First LTS

What we’ve decided to do this time is to keep the same, stable Unity 7 desktop as the default while we offer users who want to opt-in to Unity8 an option to use that desktop. As development continues the Unity 8 desktop will get better and better. It will benefit from a lot of the advances which have come about through the development of the phone OS and will benefit from continual improvements as the releases happen.

14.04 LTS: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 option for the first time
14.10: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option
15.04: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option
15.10: Potentially Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option
16.04 LTS: Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option

As you can see, this gives us a full 2 cycles (in addition to the one we’ve already done) to really nail Unity 8 with the level of quality that people expect."

[LLStarks]

Canonical is running out of time to pull the plug on Mir and save face.

If they ever want to be a credible upstream again, they need to learn how to work with others and stop these "my way or the highway" projects.