UBports Is Making Progress With Unity 8 On The Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: UBports Is Making Progress With Unity 8 On The Desktop

While it's approaching one year since Canonical decided to divest from Unity 8 and mobile/convergence, the UBports community continues making some progress in getting their forked desktop environment ready for their forked Ubuntu Touch environment as well as the desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UBports-Unity-8-January

[bregma]

This is good.

[cl333r]

I use Plasma5 but when/if Unity8 makes it I'll certainly switch to it because I only switched to Plasma because Unity 7 was dropped by Canonical. Maybe I'll even contribute some minor patches to U8 if they're welcome.

[tzui]

I wonder if it is a good idea to spend time for Xmir improvements. Top priority should be to get the new Mir Wayland compositor running on Unity 8 because even Canonical lost interest in the Mir protocol. UBports will never be able to maintain the Mir versions of GTK+ and Qt.

[Michael_S]

I wonder if it is a good idea to spend time for Xmir improvements. Top priority should be to get the new Mir Wayland compositor running on Unity 8 because even Canonical lost interest in the Mir protocol. UBports will never be able to maintain the Mir versions of GTK+ and Qt.

Canonical dropped their work on Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8, but they're still working on Mir for their Internet-of-Things projects. So the UBports team gets some help there.

I'm impressed the independent team is making progress.

[tzui]

Canonical dropped their work on Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8, but they're still working on Mir for their Internet-of-Things projects. So the UBports team gets some help there.

I'm impressed the independent team is making progress.

But now they use Wayland instead of the Mir protocol in their Mir compositor.

[bregma]

But now they use Wayland instead of the Mir protocol in their Mir compositor.

You have it a little backwards.

The Mir compositor running in Unity 8 could now support the Wayland protocol. That just means a Wayland client (eg. GTK+ apps) could run natively on Unity 8, it doesn't mean Unity 8 would be running as a Wayland client (since it's a Mir server). It's an "in addition to" not an "instead of".

[ptyerman]

It's well and truly forked now then!

[zoomblab]

I still can't believe they abandoned Unity, the best desktop and their biggest differentiator, when they were so close and after all the hard work that had already been done. I am waiting now patiently for UBports to finish this sweet piece of software. Such a shame for Canonical and also for the people that have worked on Unity 8.

[Guy1524]

I hope that canonical considers switching back to Unity 8 if this project gets mature enough. The Ubuntu Gnome interface is a sloppy hack.