Will Cooke Steps Down As Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Director

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Will Cooke Steps Down As Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Director

With Ubuntu 19.10 having successfully shipped last week and the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle just getting off the ground, longtime Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke announced he is leaving Canonical...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Will-Cooke-Leaving-Canonical

[Unklejoe]

Interesting, he’s handing it off to Martin Wimpress, one of the main guys behind Ubuntu MATE. I wonder what this means for Ubuntu MATE. Will he still have time to maintain it?

[sarmad]

The Rats leaving the sinking Ship

Everthing what Microsoft touches will die.

I uninstalled my kubuntu and installed Debian in my Desktop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

Remember If You make Business With The enemy of opensource/FLOSS You will become The enemy yourself.

Not sure what you're talking about. Ubuntu has lately been more stable and polished than it ever was.

[timrichardson]

Deakto Ubuntu has never been better and the move back to gnome was for the greater good. Snaps will be transormative. He leaves with a good resume and in my case a grateful user.

[Danielsan]

Will him continue to be a guest on the Late Nigh Linux Show? 🤔

[cl333r]

Will him continue to be a guest on the Late Nigh Linux Show? 🤔

Yeah, he Will Cook up a few stories for you.

[danboid]

Will Cooke must have a hard time getting out of preparing dinner.

Wimpy is a fine choice of replacement.

Ubuntu is back better than ever!

[Charlie68]

I do not share the enthusiasm or the catastrophism. Ubuntu is no longer very interested in the desktop and this is evidenced by the unspoken by Mark S., who regardless of the Desktop Director is the one who makes the important decisions. In practice nothing will change, as nothing changed when Will Cooke arrived.
At the limit they will take an important person out of the Mate project, which does not have many developers, if I were a Mate user I would not be so happy.
I don't think Ubuntu is better than ever, I don't get this impression when I go to the Ubuntu forums, some Canonical choices to install the default packages snap, are turning up their noses at many, as well as the inability to have Chromium (no snap) in the repositories. I do not seem to see users so satisfied, so much so that many have now passed into other distributions.

[blackiwid]

I wonder if he can be neutral, I mean he went for Mate for his family not so much because of personal taste, at least that is how it started, but many folks of alternative desktops have a deep rooted hate towards gnome-shell.

Hope he is there the exception. But I see 2 dangers:
1. he in the mid or long run moves ubuntu to mate as default.
2. he starts to mod gnome shell slowly with extensions or the shell fork they already have as far as I know from a small fork to a huge fork, to get rid of the "new desktop metaphors"

The later would be much worse because it would create 1 more fork after the backstabbing of Canonical towards the gnome project. I mean you could argue that Ubuntu's backstab was even the reason Ubuntu Mate exists at least so prominent. If Canonical would have done the normal polishing work they done for gnome 2 in the beginning of gnome 3, and dumped down some of the new ways of doing stuff like they done today with the docks and all that shit, maybe Wimpy would have brought back or never leave the ubuntu desktop.

Sure he himself used Archlinux and as far as I understand he installed also Archlinux on the PCs of his family, but then he would maybe moved them to Ubuntu eventually. Which is only relevant because I want to make the point that one of the biggest if not the only reason we have so many new desktop after gnome 3 was released was the decision of the Ubuntu Team to not support gnome 3 and polish it. They created the vaccuum / uncertainty that all this 500 other Desktops got created.

Which surely to some degree has advantages, but it splits efforts I mean it's not like we had in gnome 2 times no choice, there was KDE Gnome and XFCE to only name the big ones and there was of course lxde and other shit. But there was not 20 forks of gnome on top of that.

[YYYY]

My greatest fear is Microsoft buying Canonical and (obviously) fuck Ubuntu up, besides the bad taste seeing the MS logo when powering on.

On the other hand, despite the unavoidable laughter hearing right now, the coming of the Linux Desktop is inevitable. Windows has lost every other Windows market besides the desktop and even there MS is already preparing for the transition to Linux. Obviously, in the beginning, something similar like WSL will be introduced: Linux Subsystem for Windows so most people won't even see the difference.

The most scarce and expensive assets a company like MS have is their programmers. Imagine how many billions MS can safe by dropping Windows? There actually is no logical reason anymore to maintain Windows. Because of all of that, it's unavoidable and I imagine sooner than most of us expect, that MS will turn Linux fully!