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

[sjukfan]

The more desktops the merrier. Instead of just letting it go I think they should've asked their user base if someone wanted to develop Unity as a semi-official project. A lot of Ubuntistas uses Unity even though they can go with Gnome or others so I assume there will be a ppa for the fork in just a week, or even a non-official spin of Ubuntu with Yunit.

[anarki2]

I just wish Ubuntu had cinnamon as the next default.

[Zeioth]

I just wish Ubuntu had cinnamon as the next default.

As entry gate for Windows users, you might be right. But I think even better results could be achieved with a custom version of XFCE, like in Xubuntu. Anyway, almost every desktop environment uses Gnome applications. So at least the community will benefit from this.

[skierpage]

Well, you may have liked convergence, but since Ubuntu Phone is no more, there's nothing to converge with anymore.

That's the raison d'être of UBPorts! It lists three supported phones and many other ports in progress, including three at more than 75% complete. I don't know how many of those support plugging in an external display for the switch-to-desktop-mode trick, but even without that there's the convergence of Unity on your desktop computer and the same Unity running on your phone.

[starshipeleven]

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

None bothered forking a moving target on a different display server because of obvious manpower reasons, which is why I said "chained".
Now that development is stopped and it is no more a moving target, the fork can save Unity 8 from oblivion.

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.

The fork is good enough to salvage Unity 8 from the sunken project and bring it to Wayland, if it attracts more attention it can do more of course.

There is very little need to exchange info with manufacturers as Ubuntu Phone as firmware for phones sold by true companies is dead anyway, and as they also said they can simply build on top of AOSP/Lineage that have the lower parts already figured out.

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

Wrong, the reason they failed is that they thought they could do a full stack alone. Not even RedHat can.

[starshipeleven]

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.

Because extensions can't do convergence. Really, it's not about recreating Unity's desktop UI that can be done pretty easily with a dock, but about convergence. Give or take, Unity 8 is the GUI that is closest to that, GNOME 3 has jackshit as usual, KDE's tablet mode is limited and underdeveloped.

[starshipeleven]

Instead of just letting it go I think they should've asked their user base if someone wanted to develop Unity as a semi-official project.

There is no need to ask, this is opensource, you know.

[killyou]

This is kinda funny. Mark wanted to scrap convergence but looks like DE will be made anyway, this time without paying a penny for it. Once it will shape into something usable I can see it being picked up by Ubuntu again. Well played.

[Duve]

Unity 8 was always under a open source license and was never chained by Canonical.

Yeah and no... this has always been more of an argument against Canonical CLA than it was about open source licensing, which (the CLA) was always rather vague for a contract. It's been a factor in limiting involvement with the community on it on top of the fact that Mir and Unity are custom build for a Ubuntu environment to the determent of other distros.

[wswartzendruber]

I love the argument that Convergence is dead because Canonical couldn't find hardware partners. You all know what CyanogenMod is, right?