Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[GreatEmerald]

How do you think Canonical became the ambassador of Linux to the outside world? It was by doing things differently! The idea that Mir is what is going to really fragment Linux, as opposed to the multiple toolkits, DEs, filesystem conventions, package formats, etc, is just laughable. Did someone ask permission of all the other distributions before deciding to create Pulseaudio or SystemD? Nope. It was just done and they were adopted because they were better. Somehow, it's entirely permissible to do that when you are associated with Redhat/Fedora and you are considered 'standard GNU/Linux', but Canonical is just taking things too far. What is most amusing to me is how unaware you people are of the hypocrisy of your position.

If a smaller distribution wants to do something new, you don't care because they are irrelevant. Every major distro needs to follow the leaders though, or those 'precious resources' might be wasted. Haha, jesus, if Microsoft hadn't decided to turn Windows into a data harvesting platform, I would be sorely tempted to just abandon GNU/Linux entirely....

Mir is a big deal and is not like the other things you described. It's a huge maintenance burden to support two windowing systems in all of the core libraries, and some software needs to interface with it directly (like games). In case of toolkits, you just choose one and stick with it, it runs anywhere, plus they have a different use case and are written in a different language. Nobody writes apps against DEs, so that's irrelevant. Filesystems are completely transparent to apps. Package formats are an issue, yes, just as large an issue as Mir would have been, and I wish it was solved, but there is little one can do about it now. PulseAudio is a layer on top of ALSA, so that's irrelevant. systemd was developed in part due to Upstart having CLA, so the other companies couldn't contribute to it.

And again, no, I'm not saying that Ubuntu can't try anything new. Like I said, their Netbook Remix initiative was really nice. Ubuntu Touch is a good idea as well. What they shouldn't do is go the other way from the rest of GNU/Linux in what they call "Ubuntu", because that's what users use for reference of what GNU/Linux is.

EDIT: And calling Ubuntu the "ambassador" to linux is so misguided it's stupid. Ambassador my ass. They do almost everything independently of any other linux distribution. There are very, very few specific circumstances where their distro even remotely resembles other linux distributions, and they specifically try hard not to let those situations happen.

Due to its (former) popularity, "Ubuntu == Linux" is still a common trope, whether we like it or not.

[prodigy_]

About 3.5 years ago I was permabanned from Ubuntu Forums for suggesting that exactly this would happen sooner or later. Some of my final posts:

"Canonical amounts pretty much to zero in the Linux world. They do not contribute anything upstream, they develop their own solutions that are unnecessary and incompatible with everything else (NIH syndrome) and they completely ignore the community."

"Ubuntu Edge failure was predictable from day one. Moreover, the very fact that Canonical even came up with the idea meant they had no clue about what people actually wanted (not surprisingly, since they severed all connections with the community 3 years ago). Now all the mistakes they made are finally coming back to bite them."

"The best possible consequence for the Linux community would be Canonical finally admitting Mir and Unity fiasco and discontinuing both."

Well, better late than never.

[Gps4l]

I am happy they stop with Unity.
The reason might surprise some. I am also a gamer, and had an issue with Alien isolation on openSUSE.

( when I looked up in the game, I could not look down anymore and also looking around had some issues )

When I reported this problem to Feral, they asked me if I could try Unity, and said that they officially don't support openSUSE.
I was expecting that reply, but told them I a was pretty sure this issue would not affect just opensuse.
The support forum proved me right. I remember people on Fedora and Arch ( as usual ) having the same problem.
As usual, because on the steam Linux forums, I learned that at least for gaming there must be a lot the same between Fedora, Arch and openSUSE.
Mybe its as simple as that they are closer to the lsb standard then Ubuntu?

Fixed many game issues on openSUSE with Arch and Fedora solutions.

The solution for me with KDE, was to turn off, auto hide the taskbar.

I expect less issues with games now Unity will be gone.

[pal666]

Android =/ GNU/Linux

xserver also =/ gnu. firefox =/ gnu. and chrome =/ gnu. so who cares ?

Android is 'just' using heavily modified Linux kernel.

android is just another linux distro. if it does not look like your distro of choice, it is only your problem

[pal666]

Might as well call out "BSD has won everywhere, except for desktops and phones" because of 3-4 consoles are using it (from Nintendo and Sony).

no, you may not. most games are played on android

[pal666]

1 Linux (there are way more servers in the world then there are desktops and phones/tablets combined and at least 75% of them are running Linux)
2 Android (because of its huge mobile market share)
6 iOS (because of its tablet market share)

you have several facts from alternative reality.
android is linux, there are more android smartphones(10 digit number is sold each year) than all servers combined and there are more android tablets than ios tablets

[Vistaus]

you have several facts from alternative reality.
android is linux, there are more android smartphones(10 digit number is sold each year) than all servers combined and there are more android tablets than ios tablets

Yes, Android = Linux but Android is not a server OS, is it? That's why I listed it separately from Linux because Linux servers usually don't run desktop/user OS's... Sorry for the confusion.

But no, there are more servers in the world then there are smartphones. The fact alone that smartphones have to communicate through things like Google, WhatsApp, etc... what requires that? Lots and lots of servers. And I'm not even talking about other web technologies (web stores, web sites, and whatnot). Microsoft alone has more than one million servers and the amount is growing each year. Facebook has hundreds of thousands of servers. Google does too. etc, etc, etc.

Also, when did I say that there are more iOS tablets than Android tablets? If I though iOS had more marketshare there, don't you think I would've placed it higher? I've ranked it #6 for a reason...

So except for one little confusion, you're the who has facts from an alternative reality.

[prodigy_]

android is linux

Yeah, and MacOS X is GNU/Hurd.
/end sarcasm

Years go by but Phoronix never changes.

[pal666]

Due to its (former) popularity, "Ubuntu == Linux" is still a common trope, whether we like it or not.

in reality linux = redhat

[pal666]

Yeah, and MacOS X is GNU/Hurd.
/end sarcasm

that was end stupidity. macos is based on freebsd, not on hurd