Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

The Unity 8 desktop environment that continues to be developed by the UBports open-source community for use on UBports' Ubuntu Touch and ultimately back on the Linux desktop as well have renamed the project...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-8-Renamed-To-Lomiri

[Ironmask]

I like it, including the subtle nod to "mir" in the name. Also glad they're distancing themselves away from the cursed name of "unity", since both early Unity desktops and the Unity engine are both complete and utter dogshit. Breakaway names like this are always a good sign that a company/dev learned their lesson and are willing to move past their mistakes.

[ultimA]

Product manager: We need this product to be more present in the media but we have nothing to show. What story should we publish?
Marketing: Let's rename it.

[devius]

I hope they can make it usable on the desktop since I still prefer Unity to any other DE but it's not getting any more updates, so I'm sure it will just stop working at some point.

[cybertraveler]

I hope they can make it usable on the desktop since I still prefer Unity to any other DE but it's not getting any more updates, so I'm sure it will just stop working at some point.

I used Unity for quite a while. It served me well. The only real issues I had with it were:

• hotkeys not being registered (though I suspect that this is hard to do under Xorg. I've never had a perfect Xorg global hotkey experience. I've since noticed a big improvement on my GNU-Linux, global hotkey experience on a couple Wayland desktops).
• the searching feature is a bit slow, clunky and hard to configure. There's no good reason for this. It should be extremely snappy if all the user wants to use it for is launching commands based on their .desktop files.
• Some of the default animations are a bit slow IMO. This is tweakable though.

Otherwise, it's a great desktop. I expect some of the issues I described above have been fixed in later versions of Unity/Lomiri that I haven't tried.

[Flohack]

Product manager: We need this product to be more present in the media but we have nothing to show. What story should we publish?
Marketing: Let's rename it.

Rest assured, we are never running out of news for UBports and Ubuntu Touch. We could have renamed it any time during the last 2 years or even nearly 3 years already. We chose not - why destroy a well established name that people would recognize? - But, as stated in our press release, there are non-ignorable facts why we do it now. The biggest one is that we want to bring Unity8, now Lomiri, into Debian and other distros. We need to rename all components that contain Ubuntu therefore, and why not streamline it, and also rename Unity8? Thats basically it.

[Flohack]

ultimA You are probably right. Renames of dead code doesn’t change much.

Pull requests welcome! We are a small team and are focus on mobile devices. Whenever we can we will improve the desktop as well. The effort that we do now is to get it into Debian repos, so we hope to attract more developers that will contribute. Until then it is unlikely that we will have the opportunity to invest more time. Sad but true, with a handful of people your choices are limited.
But we speak about this since almost 3 years, emphasizing what we think and how we work. No secrets here.

BR

[royce]

Rest assured, we are never running out of news for UBports and Ubuntu Touch. We could have renamed it any time during the last 2 years or even nearly 3 years already. We chose not - why destroy a well established name that people would recognize? - But, as stated in our press release, there are non-ignorable facts why we do it now. The biggest one is that we want to bring Unity8, now Lomiri, into Debian and other distros. We need to rename all components that contain Ubuntu therefore, and why not streamline it, and also rename Unity8? Thats basically it.

I'm looking forward to being able to install it in Ubuntu, it's been next to impossible since 16.04. How usable is it really these days? I understand there's been a lot of work in Mir around Wayland and Xwayland.

[yurikoles]

Michael, there is typo

UBports,com

[starshipeleven]

Product manager: We need this product to be more present in the media but we have nothing to show. What story should we publish?
Marketing: Let's rename it.

You failed to read the current situation.

UBPorts project is a third party community that took over the sources of the Unity 8 project that was discarded by Canonical. It's fitting to give this project their own name as it is now their project.

Also to distance it from all the hate that usually (and rightfully) surrounds Canonical stuff.