Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

[mos87]

The hate is rightful, they always reinvent the wheel and always end up with sub-optimal half-ass solutions that they eventually drop.

same w/gnome stuff

[Michael_S]

Is hate rightful? Did they harm you/them/haters?

I run Ubuntu MATE and vanilla Ubuntu my personal Linux machines and love it. I still like Ubuntu the organization and community and Canonical.

But let's dive into specific things Canonical did to annoy or harm their users and community:

* They released Unity with the Amazon search shopping 'lens' installed and enabled by default, a big privacy violation and a decision not discussed with the community in any way first.

* Unity was tremendously unstable in the first few years. I liked the way it worked, I genuinely did, so I would install it at least once a year. It was a crash-happy mess for me on three different pieces of hardware (two desktops and a laptop) every time I tried it until 15.10. They pushed it out a full five years before it was stable enough to be production-ready. GNOME 2, MATE, and Xfce might have the aesthetic appeal of a McDonald's restaurant, but they have always been rock solid stable for me.

* Canonical started the development of Mir in secret, and members of Canonical's own Ubuntu community spent over six months working on bringing Unity to Wayland before Canonical told them their Unity-to-Wayland work was being abandoned. There was a big flame war over whether Mir really does anything that Wayland doesn't do, but even if it does that kind of secret project change is hurtful in a project partly developed by community contributions.

* Last, work on Mir required a Contributor License Agreement. So GPLv3 forks of the GPLv3 public Mir code could happen at any time, but at any point Canonical could make their own proprietary fork of the project. Canonical representatives insisted that a proprietary fork was not planned - but if you don't plan on a proprietary fork, then you don't need a CLA. Most other GPL open source / free software projects don't have one.

[jo-erlend]

Also, mobile industry is quite different from desktop, from UX point of view. And, the market is already dominated by Android.

The desktop UX was never intended to be the same as the phone UX, but if you are going to create a new Linux system for phones, there's no good reason to intentionally make it incompatible with desktop software.

[eidolon]

I don't like it. I would go with Trojainous, every time.

[abott]

Still a better desktop than Gnome 3.

[Flohack]

(emphasis mine)

I'm going to assume that was a quick typo and not the outcome of the *next* name change

Ha thx mate, well its also new for me. I will practice typing it over the weekend... ^^

Canonical made a big mistake to abandon Unity. Besides being the best desktop environment IMO it was also the signature of their philosophy and identity. Ofcourse it cost money to develop. They should have thought and planned according to their resources. Their mobile endeavor must have nearly bankrupt them.

The mistake was to focus on Mir, which was announced in 2013, years later after initial Wayland release,... They should have just joined forces with Wayland developers, and build Unity on top of Wayland (weston for start).

Also, mobile industry is quite different from desktop, from UX point of view. And, the market is already dominated by Android.

I believe, they could have done great job focusing only on Unity for desktop, based on Wayland.

[zoomblab]

Canonical made a big mistake to abandon Unity. Besides being the best desktop environment IMO it was also the signature of their philosophy and identity. Ofcourse it cost money to develop. They should have thought and planned according to their resources. Their mobile endeavor must have nearly bankrupt them.

[Britoid]

maybe relations between Canonical and GNOME devs were bad,

Mark Shuttleworth called them the open source tea party.

So you could say that

[ehansin]

However,... Sometimes, sub-optimal and half-finished solutions can provide good experience and knowledge, which can be used to develop/contribute-to other mature project,... Sometimes, the journey of development is beneficial for future gain,...

Thank you for ending with this. I have expressed the same sentiment here in the past in my own way. I look at my own life, full of dead ends I had to give up on. But in reality so much knowledge and wisdom came from exploring those dead ends. To say it is/was nothing but a waste to me seems totally off. My opinion.