Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[finalzone]

I am just happy, that Wayland will be finally done next week now, since no developer has to do twice the work since MIR exists
I am curious what happens to unity7 or unity8 now. I really like Unity7 and i know a lot of user so. Gnome-Shell doesnt fullfill the needs. .

Unity 7 can easily be adapted to Gnome Shell via extensions.

[Mystro256]

If you go from Gnome 3 to Gnome 2, it's almost like going into the future where efficiency has overtaken shinny. The only exception is quick launching software, but every other aspect of the UI is better in 2 than 3. That said, I'm glad unity is leaving. It was doubly useless.

Why not use MATE then? There is a Ubuntu "flavor" for that

[Up123]

If Canonical contributes to Gnome, their ideas, their bad decisions and craziness will contaminate a healthy and thriving ecosystem.

It's not Unity that I hated, It was Canonical's blatant disregard to listening to the community - I probably had 50+ posts fall on deaf ears articulating what Unity needs to change to make me a happy user.

I am not pleased at the thought of Canonical rejoining the rest of the community in any effort.

Ehm... no... Gnome never really listened to the community, Canonical does. Some ideas even got executed pretty quickly, (like the scrolling over the icon in the dash tos witch between opepn apps) at gnome I don't even know where to go to contact any developers or other Gnome users

[Guy1524]

I am completely and utterly devastated. I tried gnome, I really did, I hated it. Unity will always be my favorite DE. I am convinced most real users actually agree with me. They are content with Unity 7, happily using it, meanwhile the moaning distro-hopping hipsters here at phoronix and reddit who use whatever is more flashing and unconvential were able to get their way. Unity 8 was getting better so fast, and the great thing about Mir and Unity 8 is that it was all designed from the ground up for the best Unity experience.

[ElderSnake]

Best news I could have woken up to. With GNOME and Wayland pulling so well ahead of Canonical's efforts, I always would have loved this to happen and lessen fragmentation, but I didn't think it actually WOULD happen.

It helps I like the GNOME desktop these days, and I would urge some of the detractors of it to actually give the latest incarnations a proper go with an open mind. The other thing is I wouldn't be so concerned about losing Unity as GNOME is easily extensible enough it will be easy to create a Unity 7 type layout. And Canonical being Canonical, they'll likely do just that or have some unique spin on the desktop out of the box like they did with GNOME 2 back in the day.

As long as they don't use a bazillion extensions and think to themselves "...maybe we should fork this...", cos then the cycle begins again.

[LaeMing]

No surprise. At all.

Gnome have leaped forward at every release during the last years. Predictable release management, enterprise quality, massive innovation, real QA, superior designers and developers.

LOL@KDE

Might be worth giving Gnome another spin then. I have been a KDE user since the turn of the century, but wouldn't say I am a completely happy one. I periodically try other DEs but historically end up back on KDE pretty quickly.

[ElderSnake]

Unity 7 can easily be adapted to Gnome Shell via extensions.

Don't know what happened to my original post (I think the site swallowed it), but I think it's important to reinforce the above point. It'll be very easy to do and I hope people can approach the latest versions of GNOME with an open mind and give it a proper go. I used to dislike GNOME as much as anyone, but nowadays I really quite enjoy the experience. I'm extremely productive with it too.

[labyrinth153]

I like the concept of gnome but their ego gets in the way. Its like a desktop iOS. Only not awesome.

[wswartzendruber]

What in the world are they thinking?! I can totally understand abandoning Mir, but Unity 8 has seen a tremendous amount of development in the past six months. They are the one entity that was successfully pulling off a converged experience better than Microsoft ever did. Continuum isn't going to support multiwindow until 2019 at the earliest.

[Cerberus]

Not completely unexpected as it was obvious for a while now that they dont have the resources to complete such demanding projects like Unity 8, Mir and convergence. Shame as convergence is a great idea as well as Linux phone, but it seems we will not have any kind of alternative to Android and iOS anytime soon. Now when they abandoned Unity 8 and Mir are they still fragmenting the community? Cant wait for the usual haters to come out and comment, I am pretty sure they will always find something about Canonical and Ubuntu to criticize, personally I am sad to see Unity 7 to go because I really liked it, I hope someone will fork it, port it to Gnome Shell or something else. And I am expecting Ubuntu to modify the vanilla Gnome to make it more usable, give us Unity-like extensions for those of us who like Unity, and there are many who like it. Company is moving its manpower towards profitable areas like server, cloud etc and I cant really blame them, better to swallow the pride and concentrate on areas where you are really good and return the desktop to its roots and dont stray too far from upstream. I am hoping they will contribute to Gnome and use some of the code they developed to improve existing upstream projects, it would be a shame to waste all that code, I am sure some of it can be used in existing projects in one form or another.