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.

Comments

2018

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems 2018 will be the year of GNOME on the Linux Desktop.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say "work", do you mean "Gather up my information and sell it to the highest bidder?"

Wonderful?

[i_ate_god]

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?

Re:Wonderful?

[Thelasko]

Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.

I agree that the default settings for GNOME 3 in most distributions is terrible. It's actually very much like Unity if you ask me. However, it doesn't have to be that way. I was testing different distributions one day and discovered that one had a very nice implementation of GNOME. (I think it was CentOS.) Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

> I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD

That gave me a chuckle.

You mean you didn't want to choose between archaic, niche or weird, so you found one that is all three at once? :)

That's, kinda, a shame

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:A little late?

[squiggleslash]

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.

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?

MATE

[flatt]

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.

Re:Mir

[hackel]

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.

KDE?

[nightfire-unique]

KDE is measurably superior to both Unity and Gnome3 - features & functionality, stability, customizability, usability ...

Why dump Unity for something only marginally better?