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Canonical Killing Unity For Ubuntu Linux, Will Switch To the Superior GNOME (betanews.com)
Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets. Starting with Ubuntu 18.04, the wonderful GNOME will once again become the default desktop environment! "We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it's appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical.
Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.
So isn't it great to have an OS that lets you change your window manager for something else (like my preferred KDE5?)!
Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene? I think one of them was called BlackBox maybe?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Going from crappy to crappier.....
Dear god just use Cinnamon and call it done...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, it's terrible. GNOME 2 wasn't especially pleasing aesthetically, but it was good for getting the job done. GNOME 3 is really annoying to use. Unity isn't that bad, and definitely better than GNOME 3.
Yes, it looks as though it'll be harder and harder to displace systemd from Linux distros with the defaulting to Gnome, with it's hardcoded dependencies. Long live Devuan Linux
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I hope so, GNOME 3 really is awful, and I'm not seeing anything approaching mass adoption of it. Shuttleworth talks about the market picking it, but did it? Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
I wish Canonical had adopted Cinnamon instead. I think it's a desktop with a lot of potential, but it needs some good quality control (the fact the DM runs Webkit as root, including installed plugins, should tell you how much the Mint team cares about quality right now...) "The Market" seemed to be adopting Cinnamon and MATE. Where's this "adopting GNOME 3" thing coming from?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ubuntu MATE is an amazing release. Fast, capable, easy on resources, and it gets out of the way.
Mark, if you really want to ruffle some feathers, go with the real successor to Gnome 2. You had it right the first time.
Microsoft gave up on the desktop/mobile convergence nonsense after Windows 8. When a hybrid desktop/mobile device becomes practical, it'll just need two different desktop environments for the two different interface modes. Simple.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why Gnome 3? The summary says it clearly: "to the superior GNOME". Ie, 2, that is, MATE.
Gnome 3 is maybe superior to, uhm, Commodore 64's user interface with it's LOAD "*",8,1 -- but perhaps even that is unfair to C64.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I imagine (hope?) this means they'll be switching to Wayland. The only reason Mir existed was for their mobile convergence platform and Unity 8. Without them, there's no reason to use it.
Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets
About frigging TIME. It sucked. Royally. Props to Canonical for beating Microsoft to the punch with this idea. Having a desktop that's identical to a phone has some good points. Sounds good on paper. It's not like it doesn't have any merit at all. But it's a bloody terrible idea. And trying to shoe-horn your users into a hideous mishmash of interfaces that randomly assume two wildly different I/Os is bound to piss off a lot of people that didn't really need to be pissed off. The gain you get from "oh hey, this looks just like my phone" isn't nearly offset by all the "OMG WTF would you do that?".
One of the big reasons I just don't like windows 10. They could have made it easy. But what's easy and helpful for the desktop is nigh impossible on a phone. And what's useful to a phone is a pain in the ass for a real mouse and keyboard.
And what's the fucking point? Who runs windows 10 on a phone? Who runs Ubuntu on their phone? They were trying to position themselves to tackle the phone market, but this position doesn't make sense until you're already there. And neither got there. EVEN THEN, until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, when what's the fucking point of making this OS try to straddle the different hardware?
KDE is measurably superior to both Unity and Gnome3 - features & functionality, stability, customizability, usability ...
Why dump Unity for something only marginally better?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I really like Unity!
Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
THIS. Mint was already on the upswing before Ubuntu switched to Unity several years ago, probably because it already seemed more polished and "just worked" upon install, whereas Ubuntu at that time still tended to require post-install tweaking even to get basic stuff like basic multimedia codecs. And (according to Distrowatch) Mint surpassed Ubuntu in pagehits starting in 2011.
Around that time, Mint dumped GNOME and began focusing on Cinnamon and MATE, both of which seem to have gained widespread acceptance.
Ubuntu potentially has a real chance here to move back into the spotlight if it made the right decision for default desktop, but I'm not sure GNOME 3 is it either. Linux Mint suffered a bit of backlash last year when it announced it wouldn't ship with multimedia codecs packaged in the ISO by default (even though it's still just a matter of a checkbox during the installation dialogs, assuming one has internet access), removing one of the significant convenience reasons people flocked to Mint in the first place. Anyhow, it would be a perfect time for Ubuntu to assert it's "not so different from Mint" anymore and increase popularity again after the Unity backlash.
But GNOME 3 is probably not the best way to do that.
[Full disclosure: Mostly these days I tend to use XFCE in Linux, because I like something a bit lighter. So I have nothing personally invested in this debate.]
GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop; create a new desktop by dragging a window between any desktops; and pull up an application by bringing up the Activities view and just typing. It pretty much gets out of your way.
Unity is basically 4x4 with zoomed-out view of all desktops at once, cluttered together, with a dock and an extra click to pull out a search bar. Cinnamon has a fixed virtual desktop arrangement and (last I checked) no Activities view, so you're back to spending 6 seconds navigating (well-arranged) menus instead of 1 second to open whatever application you were thinking.
The world is moving away from Windows 95 desktop interfaces. There's a loud minority installing "Classic Shell" on Windows, and they get way too much attention.
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I'm sticking with Cinnamon, but I am glad that Unity is effectively dead -- and Mir along with it. Now Ubuntu will focus on Wayland and Gnome, and I won't get Unity pushed to my Ubuntu machine during an upgrade. Gnome is a great backup DE for Cinnamon should it break on an update.
I never cared for Unity or the convergence philosophy behind it. Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, and other DEs will have to do unless someone wants to fork Unity for those that liked it.
They are right about one thing, though -- Linux Mint is incredibly popular because so many people prefer Mate and Cinnamon (Gnome forks) over Unity. With Gnome as the default, if Gnome merges the changes from Mint, Ubuntu would be a decent user OS again... from my perspective at least. ymmv.
It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess of an OS.
If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.
For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.
All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal ...
So do you think they should throw MORE man-lifetimes down the rathole after those already wasted?
Rule 1 of business: Don't throw good money after bad. It applies to other endeavors and resource types as well.
Experiments are necessary to progress. You usually can't tell for sure if something will be a great improvement, or be crippled by "gotchas", until you try it. But once you find out, first that they're failing, second that they're not readily fixable, it's time to pull the plug, stop the waste, and move on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Gnome created as a hack by a bunch of evangelists who got their panties in a bunch because they didn't like that qt which KDE is based on, wasn't available under LGPL, only GPL. It was half a DE back in 1999, and it sill feels like half a DE written by UX wanks who want to make is as mac-like as possible.
But hey, if you like regedit, you'll love gconf!
This isn't so much an endorsement of Gnome as a rejection of Shuttleworth's pie in the sky "follow every trend" style of management and their extreme desire to reinvent the wheel at every turn. Rather than use Gnome they "developed" unity. Rather than use Wayland they "developed" Mir. Rather than pursue a desktop OS they pivoted towards the phone taking over everything.
So Unity is dead like most of their other NIH house custom plumbing projects so I suspect Mir will be next. Shuttleworth would get far more bang for his buck if he spent his money helping established projects rather than trying to reinvent the wheel at every turn.
GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop;
Having overlapping windows that don't take up the entire screen is far faster - then you don't have to hit anything to see your windows.
And "top left" and other edge/corner actions pretty much kill virtualization and multiple monitors, where screen edge != where the mouse stops.
Gnome 3 and Windows Metro are GUIs for people who work with applications blown up full screen, and never need productivity boosting functionality like copy/paste without flipping windows back and forth.
KDE is superior at a technological level. They can customize it to their liking and improve it in a shorter timeframe while also having more maintainable code (admittedly not a guarantee). More importantly, Qt is developed as an opensource project by a separate company whose sole goal is improving it. The resources poured into Qt and its industry support are orders of magnitude higher than GTK+.
If they're gonna do a course correction, I think switching to a Qt and C++ based desktop will be a good move to avoid a lot of future technical debt.
Gnome 3 sucks like Unity.
Gnome developrs took a dump on its existing user base when the came out with Gnome 3.
MATE is so much better.
It was kinda cumbersome to get used to Unity at first though.
I came from the absolute opposite (non-modal) school of using a desktop (for a long time I was an FVWM user w/ sloppy-focus, later I switched to Window Maker). So this extreme modal like click-to-focus desktop in Unity felt strange at first. But IMHO Unity is quite good at what it does. In like 2-3 days I got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore. Unity was certainly a lot cleaner and less clunky than GNOME 3 was at the time.
Unity uses the opposite user design philosophy to what I prefer for a developer's desktop (i.e. sloppy-focus for work with multiple windows). But IMHO, given what Unity aims to do, it does things extremely well from a user interface perspective.
If there are things which need to be trashed in the Linux desktop, it would be the Xlib as the default API (something like Quartz would be a good replacement and is long overdue), ALSA, Pulseaudio, and systemd.
Xlib and ALSA are the biggest reasons for the Linux desktop lagging behind everything else. They're horrible APIs. ALSA in particular is overly complicated, device specific, and complete trash. Xlib was a good design when it came out, but now that we have true-color displays, and that remote graphics make less sense it doesn't work anymore. Because ALSA and Xlib are horrible APIs, we get tremendously bloated, buggy messes of intermediary APIs to hide their overall suckiness (e.g. Pulseaudio and Qt). Pulseaudio and Qt are probably good compromises but they're the wrong solution to the problem. The problem needs to be fixed at the core libraries, not by plastering wallpaper over the cracks. Then there's Qt and MOC. Fuck MOC.
Systemd is just absolutely horrible. A jack of all trades and master of none. A bloated pig, that even its own developers probably don't understand anymore, let alone the users. it goes against the UNIX philosophy of doing only one thing and getting it right. If we want the Linux desktop to win over its rivals Windows and MacOS X, we need to push our own vision of an OS for power users. That's after all what UNIX is all about. I don't necessarily mean programmers, it could also be artists and documentation specialists. i.e. if I was a translator wouldn't I want multiple windows open at the same time with dictionaries, the text I'm working on, a glossary, etc? If I was an artist, wouldn't I want to be able to launch renders and know their status in the background while I'm working on something? An OS that empowers people and makes them productive. A desktop for large screen displays where you can work with multiple documents visible at once. Not smartphones and the card deck metaphor. Not an OS that reduces everyone to the lowest common denominator. But an OS that allows everyone to work at their peak ability.
Another thing Linux could use would be its own runtime with architecture independent binaries and application packages. Even if it's a copy of Android's. I know it isn't good for high performance apps, but we need a runtime for shovelware that doesn't suck.