UBports' Fork Of Unity 8 Plans To Eventually Get On Wayland

[starshipeleven]

Teh Internetz is a place where some people vent their personal frustrations, it happens all the time.

Fixed.

[fuzz]

There is only one fork of Unity 8, and that is Yunit (pronounced like yoonit). You even quoted it from the blog post. UBports is working *with* the Yunit team.

EDIT:
And if you don't believe me, ask them yourselves in their Telegram group.

[starshipeleven]

Hm, I'm not sure I get it. Others have said that you'd have to rewrite Unity for it to work on Wayland rather than Mir. And if you port Mir to be a Wayland server, why bother doing anything more afterwards? You need a Wayland compositor to run a shell, might as well keep Mir as one.

Because they already said it, they are NOT going to maintain a full display server. A Wayland compositor is much easier to make and can use mostly upstream stuff like libwayland.

These forking guys have their priorities right.

[starshipeleven]

I'm happy to see that the forking brigade is ready to seize the opportunity and show again why opensource is great.

I'm eager to see Unity 8 freed from its Mir chains join the happy family of Linux DEs on Wayland.

[starshipeleven]

Q: Will this be hard without Canonical?

A: Yes and no. Since this has now become a community project, we’ve seen a lot less pushback and a lot of people stepping up to help. When Canonical was the only one developing Unity, people hated it. Now people are coming out of the woodwork to say that they loved where it was going and will miss it. We have seen around 400 new devices hitting our system image server since the news. There’s a strange effect that Canonical has on the Open Source community.

[starshipeleven]

There is only one fork of Unity 8, and that is Yunit (pronounced like yoonit). You even quoted it from the blog post. UBports is working *with* the Yunit team.

EDIT:
And if you don't believe me, ask them yourselves in their Telegram group.

Or this post in the Yunit mailing list https://yunit.io/pipermail/dev/2017-April/000135.html

[Geopirate]

The problem with Convergence is Mark's vision of it. Samsung has a much better concept of what it should look like. The vast majority of people just want a dock to turn their phone/tablet into a full computer. Much fewer people don't want to cram a Desktop computer into a phone. This is an extremely important distinction to make if you plan to make money off of your product. These forks it seem are aiming to make Unity 8 a proper desktop which is what it should have been in the first place as many here have said. Working with Android to get them closer to mainstream Linux seems like a much better use of everyone's time.

The timing of this doesn't seem random at all if you if you consider the timing of the Samsung announcement.

[onicsis]

I'm happy to see that the forking brigade is ready to seize the opportunity and show again why opensource is great.

I'm eager to see Unity 8 freed from its Mir chains join the happy family of Linux DEs on Wayland.

Unity 8 was always under a open source license and was never chained by Canonical, only it was not portable.

Canonical had whole teams, specialized on various fields and directions with dedicated professionals in art, UI, UX, coding, testing and not only a few people for coding and testing. Probably, also Canonical had hardware teams and connections or information exchange with various manufacturers at company level.
A lot of [very] expensive things hard to replace by a small project.

Some of the reasons why they failed. A lot of money invested for a [very] distant and far away target.

[duby229]

Unity 8 was always under a open source license and was never chained by Canonical, only it was not portable.

Canonical had whole teams, specialized on various fields and directions with dedicated professionals in art, UI, UX, coding, testing and not only a few people for coding and testing. Probably, also Canonical had hardware teams and connections or information exchange with various manufacturers at company level.
A lot of [very] expensive things hard to replace by a small project.

Some of the reasons why they failed. A lot of money invested for a [very] distant and far away target.

Well, I think it just goes to prove that dictating expectations is the wrong path to take when developing software. A pure research and development model based on trial and error will inevitably produce better results basically every time.

[finalzone]

Waste of time on forks. Why not converting some features into extensions for either Gnome Shell or Plasma with already have Wayland support through their respective tool-kits.