Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

[eidolon]

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

[144Hz]

Canonical had some bad years where they tried to cash in all public relations for a new CLAed stack. That was a business decision and frankly an attempt of hostile takeover.

Long story short, the traditional non-CLAed stack won. Canonical reverted the business decision.

Many businesses turn good->evil, Canonical did good->evil->good.

In a few months we can celebrate another Ubuntu LTS where Canonical did significant work on GNOME and Debian

-Cheers from Fedora

[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.

[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.

[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

[Scellow]

I personally don't like the new name..

[mos87]

not like killing a software with a really bad name who nobody remembers

Can't kill what's already dead

[royce]

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.

Actually Unity was rock solid from 14.04.

[Michael_S]

Actually Unity was rock solid from 14.04.

Not for me it wasn't. Even in 14.04, after about two days of continuous uptime the lock screen would stop responding to keyboard inputs. I would need to restart the display manager using one of the TTYs or from SSH, or restart the whole box.

That happened to me on a Dell laptop and on an AMD desktop. With 15.10 it was finally stable on both.

[royce]

Not for me it wasn't. Even in 14.04, after about two days of continuous uptime the lock screen would stop responding to keyboard inputs. I would need to restart the display manager using one of the TTYs or from SSH, or restart the whole box.

That happened to me on a Dell laptop and on an AMD desktop. With 15.10 it was finally stable on both.

I never had that problem. tbf the lock screen is lightdm, not unity anyhow.