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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 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.
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
Does it mean that they have ported Gnome on Mir?
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.
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!
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
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.
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!
He probably installed 6.x, they're still on Gnome 2 which is quite nice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Debian + XFCE4 is what I've always used.
MX Linux is what you are looking for.
No, he's probably talking about 'Classic Mode', which is an alternative interface provided by gnome-shell that looks more like a Win98 / GNOME 2-style desktop. It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.
https://access.redhat.com/docu...
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.
It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.
Proving once again that people are willing to shell out big bucks for a quality product ;)
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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.
Could not agree more. I stopped using Ubuntu when they went to Gnome3. Gnome3 is a complete POS.
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
I hope they use Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is for tablets.
aaaaaaa
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...