Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

[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.

[Michael_S]

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

Canonical switched Ubuntu from gdm to lightdm, so if you installed Unity you were potentially getting that bug. So though technically the bug wasn't in Unity itself, it was the reason I stopped using Unity on 14.04.

Otherwise, yes, Unity itself didn't crash for me from 14.04 forward. Before then it was pretty messy. The good news is, Canonical seems to have learned its lesson - they keep postponing the Wayland rollout in LTS releases because they want to be certain it's rock solid, and not alienate users and customers. I want to use Wayland, but I want stability first and Wayland second.

[Veerappan]

Otherwise, yes, Unity itself didn't crash for me from 14.04 forward. Before then it was pretty messy. The good news is, Canonical seems to have learned its lesson - they keep postponing the Wayland rollout in LTS releases because they want to be certain it's rock solid, and not alienate users and customers. I want to use Wayland, but I want stability first and Wayland second.

Curious, but what software/hardware are you running that wayland is unstable for you in gnome? I've been using it daily at home for a while now on my Ryzen/rx580 in ubuntu, and on a haswell laptop in 19.10 at work as well.

The one thing that I'll fully admit needs work is remote desktop-style solutions and display casting over miracast for gnome in wayland. Not sure if that's on canonical or gnome for not having all of the stuff wired up and enabled.

[Mez']

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.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I'm sick of idiots pretending their opinion can be extrapolated to the entire universe. You think it is dogshit, it does absolutely not mean it is or ever will be. Please have some respect for others' opinions.

Many people liked Unity and regret it, whether you want it or not. Period.