Canonical Founder Talks About Ubuntu Desktop Switching From Unity To GNOME, And Focus On Cloud (google.com)

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on Friday talked about the move to switch Ubuntu's desktop user interface from Unity to GNOME, and putting a stop to development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablet: I would like to thank all of you for your spirit and intellect and energy in the Unity8 adventure. [...] Many elements of the code in the Ubuntu Phone project continue -- snaps grew out of our desire to ship apps reliably and efficiently and securely, the unity8 code itself will continue to be useful for UBports and other projects. And the ideas that we have pushed for are now spreading too. Finally, I should celebrate that Ubuntu consists of so many overlapping visions of personal computing, that we have the ability to move quickly to support the Ubuntu GNOME community with all the resources of Canonical to focus on stability, upgrades, integration and experience. That's only possible because of the diversity of shells in the Ubuntu family, and I am proud of all of our work across that full range.

Comments

Dropping PhoneTablet Dev

[wjcofkc]

I have had the opportunity to use Gnome on an x86 tablet, and it is already there. It's funny, typically I do not like Gnome. But put it on a tablet and it is awesome. Granted, I am speaking as a nerd not a general consumer. Still, if you get the chance you will see what I mean.

Ubuntu's now going to be dead on the desktop

[mTor]

I can't stand hamburger UI, giant title bars and that annoying menu/title bar at the top so I never "upgraded" to GNOME. It seems to me that GNOME team took a bunch of macOS features and stitched together a DE. However, while macOS is quite logical and there's a reason why things are on that OS, much of how GNOME works makes little sense from usability point of view.

This is why I stuck with Xfce, Unity and Cinnamon. I run all three of these DEs on my various computers and laptops.

But now that Ubuntu is moving to GNOME, what's the point of using Ubuntu over Fedora? RedHat has all the GNOME devs and they have the best GNOME + Wayland implementation. And that implementation actually works without Xorg. Other distros that run GNOME still can't get Wayland working right. Can Canonical/Ubuntu team make a better version of GNOME than RedHat? Given the history, I'm willing to bet money against that.

I'm also quite sick of apt-get and inflexible PPAs and managing them has been an absolute hell. Things just break, packages end up conflicting and untangling the mess can take you hours. I find Fedora's DNF and Copr a lot more sane (almost as sane as pacman and AUR on Arch but probably not as good).

So in conclusion, I really don't see a point in using Ubuntu anymore. If you want APT, just use Debian instead. If you care about GNOME, use Fedora. I'll be replacing Ubuntu with Fedora on one of my laptops later this year... and not with next version of Ubuntu+GNOME.

I can't be the only one...

[ckatko]

...that liked Unity. And I'm NO casual. But it made excellent use of space on a Netbook. I dislike how they basically use every possible meta key combination, but in exchange for that, I get super fast virtual-desktop commands, moving windows inside a desktop, and moving windows across desktops. My little 2 GB RAM Chromebook with ~10 inch screen converted to Ubuntu is the workhorse of my day. I use it for clients, for RDP, I use it at home for fun and programming hobby games.

I honestly don't know what I'm going to switch to now. I hate that you can't customize everything in Unity, but what you could customize with a few tools, worked well for me.

I combine Unity with Guake. Guake is a top-down multi-tab terminal like the Quake drop-down console. So I've got virtual desktops for each task, one for personal internet, one for business internet, one for taking notes, and one for running Audacity while recording conferences. Meanwhile, I use Guake and quake pops down with F5, and goes back up with F5. And, Guake doesn't change when you change virtual desktops. So I can have four tasks running, and tasks inbetween them can be in Guake. (Of course, Guake also has multi-tabs.)

So between the two, I'm very fast and efficient with my keypresses. People will watch me work and be amazed. And I go, "This is Linux, and it's awesome."

But Unity is a big chunk of that efficiency for me. People say it's slow and fat, but my 2 GB RAM laptop seems to be just fine with it. It almost never crashes. I've got some plugins for it that work well for monitoring stats. Meanwhile, I open a single Google Doc in Chrome on my system and it takes almost half of my entire machine's memory and CPU usage. And even sites that aren't as notoriously fat as Google Docs, still fill up my RAM fast. So my entire supposedly "fat slow" system is dwarfed by most websites.

So, yeah, this kind of sucks. Just when these dumb twats at Canonical get people to change (while telling us the whole time "this is the BEST way to do Linux!") they change their minds and go back. So whatever high ground they had before, they just lost by going right back to GNOME3. Who the hell is running that company? A couple of monkey's humping a random number generator? I can't wait to find the next "modern feature" they shoved down our throats, only to change their minds on.

Re:I can't be the only one...

[squiggleslash]

I didn't like Unity, but I respected it, and found it to be usable - something GNOME Shell just isn't, not without a lot of work and a massive change in workflow and expectations anyway. Unity was a serious attempt to build a better desktop, but Canonical married itself to concepts before testing them in the real world, and I honestly think if they'd done more user testing, the dock wouldn't have been left in (not in that form anyway), and the "search for everything" model would have been dumped.

I wish they'd been successful, and in a contest between GNOME Shell and Unity, I wish they'd had have prevailed.

Alas Shuttleworth's comments suggest that, while they'll contribute to GNOME, it's unlikely they'll ship any improvements without the GNOME team's blessing. So this is a wholesale surrender to a failed, deeply unpopular, desktop, by a better alternative. It's very sad.