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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.
The main difference between Gnome and KDE is the underlying GDI & widget toolkits. KDE uses QT from Trolltech and GNOME uses GTK which is developed as a sub-project of GNOME. Of course their custom browsers and mail clients are different and have different names. The desktop file management paradigm is different and so is the menu/toolbar location. Politically, they are run by very different types of people without much cross-pollination.
The package management is a difference at the system/OS level, not the desktop, but you knew that. Neither "lost out", in my opinion because they were never much worth using in the first place. Unix variants are all about the CLI. If you want a consistent GUI with a benevolent tyrant running things and keeping it all standard, go buy a mac or run RISC-OS. Linux has been failing at that for more than 20 years now, despite the "takeover the world" mantra.
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.
He had no choice but to admit defeat. He's positioning the business for either an outside investment or an IPO (in other words, he wants to cash out). As for redirecting resources, some departments are being hit with layoffs of up to 60%.
Other failures:
And of course absolutely horrific color schemes ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.