Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[Vistaus]

I am forced to eat my words.

Good thing you posted, I was just about to call you out because you were raving about how Unity and Mir were progressing so nicely and they were most likely not going to abandon it. But now they did after all. I do wonder though @bregma: are they going to port GNOME to Mir now? Or are they going to abandon Mir completely and switch to Wayland?

[Vistaus]

Honestly I thought if anything, they would do this rather than switch back... unless they plan to take the cinnamon route of things and fork portions of the desktop, such as the shell.

Why fork when they can just add their own extensions, just like ZorinOS did?

[SpyroRyder]

Why fork when they can just add their own extensions, just like ZorinOS did?

The reasons behind Cinnamon are your answer. Maintaining a complex extension set on a product where the devs screw around with the API's and several core concepts is very taxing and requires you to move at their development pace. Otoh, Gnome-shell has essentially been stable for the last few releases with only a few breaks in extension compat and maybe if they rebuild shell for GTK4 they could do it with Ubuntu factored in. That's probably a stretch, but Gnome has a few different devs now so it might be possible

[kpedersen]

Why is everybody complaining about DEs when anybody can run

sudo apt-get install $DE_of_choice

Thats the problem though. Unity being a bloated piece of sh*t means that now a company like Canonical isnt going to maintain it. I doubt users can. So in the future your little command:

sudo apt-get install unity

... will fail :/

Just like the command

sudo apt-get install gnome

Also fails... and installs some random piece of crap (called Gnome 3) instead.

[TiberiusDuval]

Again in this thread many have written about linux "fragmentation", and wanted their favorite DE (and likely their favorite distro) be the only and one. Ok. That may help when competing against Windows. But for me, and I hope for many others, Linux means freedom. Don't like some particular distro? Try some other. Don't like some particular DE? Try some other. And so on. What those "fragmentation" complainers seem to want is free Windows. Meaning you can choose as long as it is Red Hat or some of its free derivatives. You can choose DE as long as it is Gnome3. And you can have desktop theme as long as it is Adwaita. For that kind of freedom why bother. Just use Windows 10 and be happy.

I don't particularly care if Linux desktop will ever be bigger thing than Windows, I only care that it has enough software to do everyday tasks. And for that it does not need to be one with biggest market share. And if ever underlaying freedom is sacrificed for that market share bullsh.. I'll ditch the whole system.

[nanonyme]

Good thing you posted, I was just about to call you out because you were raving about how Unity and Mir were progressing so nicely and they were most likely not going to abandon it. But now they did after all. I do wonder though @bregma: are they going to port GNOME to Mir now? Or are they going to abandon Mir completely and switch to Wayland?

I'd expect snowball's chance in heck that could end up upstreamed. Mir will die, it's now a matter of time

[Vistaus]

The reasons behind Cinnamon are your answer. Maintaining a complex extension set on a product where the devs screw around with the API's and several core concepts is very taxing and requires you to move at their development pace. Otoh, Gnome-shell has essentially been stable for the last few releases with only a few breaks in extension compat and maybe if they rebuild shell for GTK4 they could do it with Ubuntu factored in. That's probably a stretch, but Gnome has a few different devs now so it might be possible

But Mint has a different vision than Canonical, so you can't really compare that. For the record: I was talking about Canonical adding extensions rather than forking, not why Cinnamon was created. And like you said: Shell is stable now. Themes and most extensions don't need updating. Except that extension devs should up the version number (i.e.: add 3.24 to the supported list). But for Canonical that wouldn't be a problem if they build their own extensions, they know what they're doing.

[Zoll]

This reminds me when Redhat abandoned Desktop Linux and concentrated on servers. Canonical appears to be making the same move now, abandon desktop Linux and concentrate on the "cloud". I feel there are a few people who lost their jobs over this. Too bad they went backward to Gnome when Plasma is a superior alternative. But most Linux users can install their DE of choice, it's KDE Neon for me.

[Ekaradon]

Again in this thread many have written about linux "fragmentation", and wanted their favorite DE (and likely their favorite distro) be the only and one. Ok. That may help when competing against Windows. But for me, and I hope for many others, Linux means freedom. Don't like some particular distro? Try some other. Don't like some particular DE? Try some other. And so on. What those "fragmentation" complainers seem to want is free Windows. Meaning you can choose as long as it is Red Hat or some of its free derivatives. You can choose DE as long as it is Gnome3. And you can have desktop theme as long as it is Adwaita. For that kind of freedom why bother. Just use Windows 10 and be happy.

I don't particularly care if Linux desktop will ever be bigger thing than Windows, I only care that it has enough software to do everyday tasks. And for that it does not need to be one with biggest market share. And if ever underlaying freedom is sacrificed for that market share bullsh.. I'll ditch the whole system.

I would like too see Linux and the open-source solutions become the standard by opposition to some closed-sources and private solutions. I think it would make the world a better place. And if this kind of thing could happen for materia medica and knowledge, it would be something...

However, I cannot agree more on the liberty to choose what you want to use. Why bothering to troll other distributions just because it is not the one you use. Is it so hard to accept that someone want to use something else that your settings? Cannot you just accept freedom of choices in something as trivial that computer use?

Seriously, people are too much busy creating their owns problems.

[uid313]

So now they are ditching Unity and Mir, just like they ditched Upstart in favor for systemd.
All these efforts on Mir could have been spent on improving Wayland.
All the Gtk/Qt work on Mir, could have been spent on improving Gtk/Qt on Wayland.
All the Unity 8 and Mir work could have been spent on porting Unity to Wayland.