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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.
It seems 2018 will be the year of GNOME on the Linux Desktop.
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...
This sounds like April 1st news. But as real news, I'm guessing that when Gnome does return to Ubuntu as the default DE, it'll be a bit customized at least. It wouldn't be too had to create the addons to make Unity users feel a little more at home on Gnome 3.
Going from crappy to crappier.....
Dear god just use Cinnamon and call it done...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While neither Gnome nor KDE are perfect, they are still the best "general" desktops for most users. Most users doesn't mean most /. users are very technical people/ I'll still very fond of Window Maker and prefer it with KDE a close second.
If FOSS developers had spent all this time trying to not copy Windows and it's use case, Linux and FOSS in general would be ahead of Microsoft and Mac.
This is good news and may yet help get more people on the Linux desktop.
I'm still very much attracted to the idea of using my phone as my primary computing device, but not so much that I want to carry the weight of Unity around with me. ChromeOS is already showing us how to seamlessly inject Android apps into the desktop space.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Wow. All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal waste (arguably by some, from the very beginning). I'll admit I'm very disappointed that they are abandoning convergence though. And what this means for SNAPS I'm really not sure.
I'm not a huge fan of either desktop, but Unity seemed better thought out and closer to an ideal system than GNOME's "Re-invent everything but for no apparent reason" approach.
I guess I'll stick to Cinnamon for now. I just wish someone would put together a good GNU/Linux 2:1 desktop.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Outside of Redhat's bubble, GNOME hasn't been relevant in years. The developers of GNOME went full Apple in trying to control how users use their computer.
Gee, no bias in that report.
Personally I still prefer KDE, although it is starting to get a bit crufty and sucky.
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
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
Another company realizing that the desktop/laptop requirements are fundamentally different from smartphone/tablet requirements. Trying to use one OS/GUI to serve both might sound like a great way to cut development costs for a company, but its also a great way to produce a poor user experience that doesn't deliver 100% on either platform.
Shit, wrong damn story
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
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
They could probably produce something which looks and feels extremely close to the existing Unity using GNOME shell. They're not forced to take the default behaviour if they don't want it although that is not a bad decision either. Perhaps they'll also dump Mir while they're at it.
Does it mean that they have ported Gnome on Mir?
Finally. It was fashionable to hate it. And we did. Not in for Gnome, but as long as it's not Unity...
well, at least they could go with Cinnamon.....but i would prefer something like KDE or at least Qt based.
Man, this is such good news I'm gonna bash all my coworkers who still use that INFERIOR UNITY CRAP. ...although, I understand their crappy decision, partially: most of them are lazy to change or simply found Unity good enough, and the fact it is the default choice on the login screen also helps.
Gnome sucks bye bye Ubuntu !
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Wait, too late. I'm blown away by this announcement! Canonical has been *so* invested in Unity over the years, in spite of a ridiculous amount of resistance from the community. I don't think Unity 7 is awful, though I certainly welcome the move to pure GNOME. Unity 8 has indeed been a disaster, but I really wanted Ubuntu Phone to take off. Particularly once Android support is added. I really hope this effort will continue, as Google is closing Android more and more each release.
My biggest interest is in retaining locally integrated menus. I find these incredibly useful. I can't stand a global menu bar, but reclaiming the screen real-estate menus take up is a huge advantage. I know many GNOME apps have Chrome-style master menus in their title bars, but I would much rather have a full menu available with shortcut keys and on hover.
Unity sucks (my opinion and of many many others). I use Ubuntu Gnome and before it was official I had to install and remove all the packages by myself.
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?
You mean the GNOME that was so "wonderful" that it resulted in the rise of multiple forks and a mass exodus of developers? The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I was always fond of gnome 2 myself. I'm also really fond of Mate.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard,
Oh, hey, it's been while since I looked. This is totally possible.... if you go out of your way to get a phone that supports MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link), and get a dock that then supports that. The MHL people are fragmented as hell unfortunately.
I really enjoy Unity. Hopefully it will continue to be available as an alternative window manager.
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
Unity was introduced as a lightweight out-of-the-way window manager for Ubuntu Netbook Remix version, and on a small screen netbook it was actually quite brilliant compared to the alternatives. The concept of maximizing the menu into the title bar and merging it with the status bar *really* saved a lot of space on a small screen, and auto-maximizing windows is somewhat necessary too.
The concept just doesn't scale so well to dual 24" monitors, although I think most people have kind of gotten used to it.
The main problem I find is that behind Unity, there's a lot of useless Gnome shit still burning cycles...
Log in or piss off.
Is the driver support. Unity always sucked. But if you don't buy a crappy computer, driver's really aren't a problem. Ubuntu phone...seriously who was going to buy that garbage.
Give my good old Debian or CentOS and I'm good.
I really like Unity!
I thought it was fine, but there were a couple things I hated. The forced grouping of terminal windows in the task bar which basically breaks ALT-TAB, and breaking the ability to map ALT+F10 shortcut to maximize window. In the end, I doubt I'd enjoy using it for extended periods of time.
Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.
It would be nice if you would tell us what this setting is. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
What really sucks in this whole story with the Ubuntu Unity (besides the software itself) is the fact that the entire Ubuntu community was mislead by one individual.
I really don't care if he admitted he was wrong, what I care is about years of engineering effort wasted and the Linux desktop platform reputation affected because of one person dumbness.
I would expect that the Ubuntu Foundation look into this shameful failure of common sense and do something to prevent it from repeating in the future.
But I'm not holding my breath as he pays their salaries.
Is it just me or was 2010 the good old days of Linux when the GUIs were good, effects were in via eye cand with openGL add ons, you could actually minimize WIndows too!
Gnome 3 got me to give up on Linux and switch to Windows 7 after 10 years waiting. Ubuntu was close with Gnome 2 and its anti aliagned LCD cleartype fonts. THen #### Unity and Gnome 3 had to come in.
At least Microsoft acknowledges when it went down that path with Windows 8 that not everyone wants a cell phone on there desktop and went with Windows 10. When will Gnome go back to 10 years ago for improved UI?
http://saveie6.com/
The best phone I ever had ran Debian.
Ubuntu is pretty much a variant of Debian Testin, so why not.
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!
Debian + XFCE4 is what I've always used.
I am sorry to hear this. Unity is a desktop I like to play with, browse some sites, make a documents and so on. It is something different than KDE and Gnome and it adds to the plurality of Linux. The majority of /.ers didn't like it, but we will all be poorer without it.
And, no, I don't have the resources or the expertise to take it over. I will probably switch to KUbuntu.
Now if we can just get people to realize XFCE is the best. GNOME is nothing but eye candy and doesn't really do anything special that a whisker menu, catfish, synapse combo can't. And, that combo is much faster, especially on older computers. Also, a lot of the panel items people try to hunt down for GNOME and Mate are already available by default in XFCE.
This story was first published on April 1st and is just now making it to the front page. The other story in the firehose is how they will be using Wayland instead of Mir. The next thing you know, Microsoft will join the Linux Foundation. (am i rite?)
just when I mentioned the other week that "I totally can get used to this unity or what it is called": https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and I'm not even a Ubuntu user ;-)
Give me twm and a stippled root window any day.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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.
I use XFCE on my two laptops, and main workstation.
I can't stand thr bulkiness of KDE or Gnome.
I've experimented with other WMs but none of them provide the full desktop environment, and can be difficult to configure.
I use IceWM on my HTPC.
Finally!!! Oh my God! At least Canonical is capable of admitting it's mistakes. Seriously, the whole Unity idea was just plain goofy from the start. It's strange that Canonical can't hire a good designer, it's a rich company.
have you tried xubuntu?
Systemd is terrible and what they've been doing to Linux is also terrible. No more simple ifconfig to set an ip address. You need to create a file in /etc/network/eth-whatever and add some options. No more "route" either, so how do you set a route? Oh and the best part is things like nslookup and traceroute are not included by default! Neither is "man" which I had to install manually. Sure give me 10,000 obscure and buggy libraries but not include core utilities like nslookup? Oh and I almost forgot. On a completely idle system, systemd is using the most cpu time out of everything else. So nice of my startup manager is the top resource hog.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
Someone has the idea to fork unity8 and continue
http://unity8.org/
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Is it possible to download "Superior GNOME" today?
All I can find is regular GNOME...
Thanks in advance!
Well its about time. I ran about four editions of Ubuntu, but Unity killed it for me, found it awful on 32 bit computers which is why I have been running Linuxmint since then, without any problems.
Nuff said
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
Could not agree more. I stopped using Ubuntu when they went to Gnome3. Gnome3 is a complete POS.
... Drop Mir for Wayland, and quit fragmenting shit.
Manjaro OpenRC seems to be getting rave reviews.
It is based on Arch.
Android for desktops. Have not tried it, but it looks promising.
I've been using Windowmaker as my primary desktop since 2001. When I worked at Sun (back when it was still Sun) Microsystems, I compiled Windowmaker and ran it on Solaris. It's fast, lightweight and pretty much does all the things you want a windowing system to do. I still use it.
Quit whining.
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.
He probably had, like me, a Nokia N900.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Actually it was to some extent based on Ubuntu, given that the init(1) replacement was upstart, but most of the non phone specific packages were from Debian.
My current phone uses Wayland and systemd, just to freak out any passing VUAs.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
KDE 3 is still the best DE ever made for Linux. I really wish someone with the know-how, time, and money had kept it going the way the MATE guys did with gnome2.
You mean like the Trinity team?
(But, if you haven't tried KDE5 recently, you should.).
Questions: https://interviews.slashdot.or...
and
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I hope they use Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is for tablets.
aaaaaaa
Very pretty, but not very good for getting actual work done.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just remember how both gnome & ubuntu advanced when they worked together. I think both grew stronger during that time and had were at their best.
They splits ways, for no good reason, sure the first release of Gnome 3 was not really up to snuff, but Unity can almost be completely remade in Gnome 3 with extentions etc. Now combining forces again, both projects can grow faster and advance at a faster pace.
Also, there is no reason why Gnome 3 wouldn't be a good fit for a phone/tablet just as much as Unity was.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
GNOME Shell is my favourite Linux desktop. I am using it happily on my CentOS 7 development machine at work. It is great that Ubuntu are going to adopt GNOME as their default desktop but you just know it is going to be tainted by one of their ugly brown/orange themes...
I've been running Linux almost exclusively for almost 20 years on my primary desktop. I've tried many many desktop environments, but I've come back to GNOME 3 and I actually really like it... once I got used to it. It's not cluttered, it's one of the most polished DE's available and relatively bug free. There are a few small issues, but not nearly as much as other DEs.
I really liked Windowmaker much better as it was much easier to adapt. Then something sent wrong between X, NVidia and Windowmaker where each blamed the others as being the problem, so I went to XFCE4 as well,
Not as flexible as Windowmaker, but not bad.
And I HATE the KDE/GNOME/XFCE/Whatever devide. I run KDE/GNOME/Whatever programs as I please. A desktop should just show the programs on my screen.
Now I have a PC with a BIOS that tries to do everything with a bootloader that tries to do everything, running a Windowing program that tries to do everything, so I can connect a browser that tries to do everything to a website that tries to do everything.
The reason I went to Linux was because it was like Lego blocks. I could use whatever I waned and had options. Now I have issues if I don't want the printer drivers installed, because it wants to delete everything when I try to do that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I use unity, gnome3, win7,8,10, and osx all the same way. I remove as many non-background things as I can. Then I hit some key or keys and begin to type what app I want to start, like brow... Or term... Then I pick one with the arrow keys and hit enter. Given that my use case doesn't really favor any particular choice I have trouble understanding the heat in these discussions. What does Cinnamon do (or not do) that gnom3 fails at?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
But what's going to happen to UbuntuTouch then?