Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[SaucyJack]

I do not understand why they dropped unity. They spent so much time on it and some people actually liked it. Why scrap all of that work when you could port to wayland instead? Feels like it's impossible for canonical to make a good decision.

[cygn]

Maybe they decided to give up when they realized that a well written Qt Dock can fare better ?

[Holograph]

Prediction: Unity 9 comes out, is Wayland-based

"I'm gonna play it safe: I'll wager zero dollars."

[A-Singh]

I'm not happy about this at all.

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.

Seems they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Gotta love this community right. /s

[jacob]

I'm disappointed. Not that I ever cared about convergence, but if they are ditching it, I would have hoped they would continue developing Unity 7 and maybe bring it to Wayland. IMHO it has long been and still is the best and most pleasant Linux desktop.

Those Gnome 3 users who claim that an Unity experience can be recreated in Gnome, could someone,please please please, create a Howto on which extensions and settings exaclty are needed to make that happen? Specifically I would love:

- to be able to put icons on the desktop
- have the menu bar on the top of the screen
- the HUD!
- a way to sort and browse installed apps and recent documents per type (arguably this always kinda sucked in U7, but last time I tried Gnome3 it was much worse)

[hrkristian]

You know what I'd like?

For people to not say GNOME is *shit*.
Because no, GNOME Shell is not shit. A 1974 Lada is shit. A $250 laptop from Lenovo is shit. A plastic chair from 1994 is shit. GNOME Shell has shortcomings, or just doesn't fit you, but it's not shit. You don't *hate* it.

When you want to vent your frustrations with GNOME, please come with concrete examples of what you don't like. What the fuck does it help anyone or anything for you to just bitch and moan like a 14 year old girl?

[A-Singh]

goes to show Shuttleworth is a Failure.

Considering how much of his own money has gone into promoting Ubuntu and bringing Linux to the point where its usable by noobs like me, I would strongly disagree.

[Mavman]

Considering how much of his own money has gone into promoting Ubuntu and bringing Linux to the point where its usable by noobs like me, I would strongly disagree.

There are distros easier than Ubuntu! For sure you know that...

[GreatEmerald]

Well. This is unexpected. This is...

An end, once and for all.

The end of Cerberus as we know it. By the illusive man himself, no less.

Not the end of Cerberus itself, just the end of what we know it as... And that's really nice.

Mir was fated to die the day it was announced. Just like they dropped Upstart, it makes sense that they dropped Mir. (Now why is Bazaar still alive?) Unity is... unexpected. It does make sense, though; at least version 7 is coded in a way that's not portable, so good luck getting any help from the community. Meanwhile GNOME 3 is now the industry standard.

Speaking of 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.

No, convergeance has always been a really impractical idea, so I'm relieved that this has finally been dropped.

Are they still fragmenting the community? Yes, with Snappy as opposed to Flatpaks, and the aforementioned Bazaar. But thankfully those are minor things. If they deliver, Ubuntu in my eyes will rise from being a hazard that should be frowned upon to being neutral. And thus I won't be upset any more at how everything is made for Ubuntu first and foremost, or how it's still a common conception to equate Ubuntu to desktop Linux. So this is great news, and we go back to the good old times when Ubuntu was a leader for a good reason rather than inertia.

And indeed, porting elements of Unity to other shells makes a lot of sense.

[dungeon]

They should change color to brown again i guess