Ubuntu 16.10 Isn't Going To Use Mir / Unity 8 By Default

[MiUNX]

Do people still use Ubuntu?

[linuxforall]

Yes and so do many big corporations and universities.

[A-Singh]

That's what people have been saying for over 3 years and why it is such a big deal.

Better to wait until it's actually ready and usable before making it the default. Do you not remember when they first introduced Unity?

[dh04000]

Did anyone watch the video yet? Where reasons for this decision given?

[Mystro256]

Cant see how Mir or Wayland will be default instead of Xorg in the next 2 years on any major distro.

Fedora may actually get Wayland within the next 2 years... but I'm guessing either the release a year from now (f26), or the release half a year from that (f27)

[valeriodean]

Fedora may actually get Wayland within the next 2 years... but I'm guessing either the release a year from now (f26), or the release half a year from that (f27)

Why not for F25?

Anyway, LOL for the Mir comedy.

[GreatEmerald]

Well, this is quite a race between Fedora and Ubuntu.

[kurros]

Did anyone watch the video yet? Where reasons for this decision given?

Will Cooke said it was mostly a quality/polish thing. It sounds like the plan is for the unity8 packages to be in the desktop meta package and installed automatically and will be available as an alternative session on the login screen, but unity7 will still be the default.

It's taken a long time for unity to get to unity7's current maturity. I think its a good plan to give unity8/mir/xmir/etc one (at least) cycle of usability and edge case testing before considering it as a default.

[shanefagan]

I'll defend Mir and Unity8 as a concept but the lack of direction over the past few years of Ubuntu desktop has been quite sad. The server has flourished with loads of great new things but then compare that to the desktop which has basically been in going down hill really slowly in terms of the amount of interesting features coming for the past 4 years. I like using Unity and I think Unity8 is nice looking but why are they waiting for so long to push it to mainstream? It is written in Qt right? Why not just use compiz on the desktop and push it forward way earlier and not have a diverged code base? Their entire idea of Unity8 was the same interface on all devices and form factors but at the moment it they are insisting on the opposite.

[kaprikawn]

Well, this is quite a race between Fedora and Ubuntu.

Fedora has pretty much won already depending on what metric you use. Wayland is useable and stable on the current version of Fedora that's available to use now. The only people who wouldn't want to use it are gamers and a few others such as those who need remote desktops. They're in the home stretch ironing out the last of the big ticket items for Wayland as default. Whereas Canonical haven't even got a plan/timescale for introducing Mir. It's not even close.