Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[GreenByte]

So unexpected. Mark probably was already like "why we doing this stuff?" 2 years after the beginning but he still had his hopes high up. Another 2 years later he finally understood that it would take them another 6 to finish the damn thing.

[klapaucius]

If they just gave up on phones, I would understand. If they just gave up on Mir, I'd be like "finally". If they just gave up on Unity, I'd be a little bit surprised. But since they're surrendering all of these at the same time, that's a shocker.

The phone project depended on Unity8, which in turn depended on MiR, which was doomed from the beginning, because it heavily depended on the vendors' support.

So not a big shocker, really.

[FishPls]

Jeez. This was a complete surprise.

I always thought Unity was a good DE. Would've preferred if they used Wayland instead of Mir, but apparently the whole thing is now shelved. I wonder what all the Canonical employees who were working on Mir / Unity 8 will be doing now? Getting fired? Contributing to GNOME?

[Up123]

I hope there will be a KDE snap

[schmidtbag]

The phone project depended on Unity8, which in turn depended on MiR, which was doomed from the beginning, because it heavily depended on the vendors' support.

Abandoning the phone project would not require abandoning Unity or Mir. Abandoning Mir would not require abandoning Unity; the phone could have been designed to use Wayland or X11 if they actually put the time and effort in. Abandoning Unity would require abandoning the phone project; Mir could have still existed, but it wouldn't have really had much use. Unity was the one thing they could have kept developing without being a total waste of time, since people do actually like it and use it.

[zankuro]

Samsung S8 Desktop Mode kills Canonical Convergence.
I prefer KDE, but this is a good decision.

[FishPls]

Also, I was glad that Unity 8 was being written with Qt.. RIP my dreams, back to the GTK+ we go. Welcome out-of-tree patches galore and shit I suppose again. Unless Ubuntu won't be making any changes to their version of GNOME.

[edoantonioco]

so now MS has no competition on the convergence, no free software alternative

I can understand this, but why dropping unity? now ubuntu will become just another random and boring distro

[sarmad]

Wow, what a shock. I am ok if they ditch Unity 8, but I was hoping that the keep the phone around.
Anyway, if they sticked with Gnome from the very beginning and spent all these years improving gnome to make it fit for phones the story would've been different now.

[wizard69]

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Dropping-Unity

Err April 1st has passed.

Seriously I'm no fan of Ubuntu and Unity is one of the reasons, but this is a surprise.

It is sad to see them giving up on phones and I suspect this likely means tablets too. I have this desire to see a truly open tablet system to compete with Apples iPad.