Why Did Ubuntu Drop Unity? Mark Shuttleworth Explains (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Ubuntu's decision to ditch Unity took many of us by surprise earlier this year. Now Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth shares more details about why Ubuntu chose to drop Unity. From a report: Shuttleworth says he, along with the other 'leads' at Canonical, came to a consensual view that they should put the company on the path to becoming a public company. And to appear attractive to potential investors the company has to focus on its areas of profitability -- something Unity, Ubuntu phone, Unity 8 and convergence were not part of: "[The decision] meant that we couldn't have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. It doesn't mean that we would consider changing the terms of Ubuntu for example, because it's foundational to everything we do. And we don't have to, effectively," he said. Money may have meant Unity's demise but the wider Ubuntu project is in rude health. as Shuttleworth explains: "One of the things I'm most proud of is in the last 7 years is that Ubuntu itself became completely sustainable. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and Ubuntu could continue. It's kind of magical, right? Here's a platform that is a world class enterprise platform, that's completely freely available, and yet it is sustainable. Jane Silber is largely to thank for that." While it's all-too-easy for desktop users to focus on, well, the desktop, there is far more to Canonical (the company) than the 6-monthly releases we look forward to. Losing Unity may have been a big blow for desktop users but it helped to balance other parts of the company: "There are huge possibilities for us in the enterprise beyond that, in terms of really defining how cloud infrastructure is built, how cloud applications are operated, and so on. And, in IoT, looking at that next wave of possibility, innovators creating stuff on IoT. And all of that is ample for us to essentially put ourselves on course to IPO around that." Dropping Unity wasn't easy for Mark, though: "We had this big chunk of work, which was Unity, which I really loved. I think the engineering of Unity 8 was pretty spectacularly good, and the deep ideas of how you bring these different form factors together was pretty beautiful.

Comments

It's a shame

[Harold Halloway]

I was happily using Ubuntu until 17.10. Gnome desktop scaling is very primitive compared to Unity and made my small hi-res screen look awful at 125% and 150% scaling. So I've gone back to Windows 10, which is a shame really.

Re:It's a shame

[Curupira]

A shame, but what about KDE Plasma 5.x? Does it scale well?

Re:It's a shame

[slacka]

I'm writing this on Ubuntu 17.10 with a 1080p 13" monitor and 1.5 scaling that's perfect. How?

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

KDE's HiDPI scaling is as good as Unity's if not better. Also, why didn't you continue to use Unity? If you upgraded, Unity is still a desktop option, but my guess is that you are trolling or lazy.

Re:It's a shame

[AirFrame]

As someone using an HP Spectre X360 13" laptop (1920x1080 screen) with a 27" Samsung 4K monitor, I can happily say that desktop scaling sucked *ss on Unity and has merely switched to sucking the dog's bollocks under Gnome. Either way, you'll be left with a bad taste in your mouth.

Windows 10 can somehow figure out if i'm using my laptop with a 4k 27" screen, or with a 1600x1200 21" screen (I have the 21" at work). Once logged in, the scaling matches between both screens. It "just works". Ubuntu has *never* done this, on any screen setup i've had.

25 years with Linux, however, and i'm not giving up now...

Re:It's a shame

[Harold Halloway]

No, I'm pretty new to using Linux so I wasn't aware that that was an option.

Re:It's a shame

[bluefoxlucid]

Imagine if, rather than creating a whole new desktop environment, they'd just improved Gnome's scaling.

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with a surface pro tablet is that no, windows 10 isn't very good at scaling.

Also, to hell with that piece of junk.

Re:It's a shame

[Harold Halloway]

In retrospect that would have been the ideal solution.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is how you get people on Linux. Through insults and abuse. Good job, jackass.

Re:It's a shame

[SeaFox]

I was happily using Ubuntu until 17.10. Gnome desktop scaling is very primitive compared to Unity and made my small hi-res screen look awful at 125% and 150% scaling. So I've gone back to Windows 10...

There are plenty of Ubuntu-derived distros using other DEs. Did you try any of them? Completely dropping Linux because of a lack of Unity seems a bit extreme.

Re:It's a shame

[Harold Halloway]

No, but I've downloaded Kubuntu and will try that out later.

Re:It's a shame

[DeBaas]

In my experience Linux Mint with Cinnamon scales well.
The only thing is that on my dual monitor setup with one 4k screen (4096x2160) and another at 1900x1200 the 1900x1200 uses the same scaling (so too large). That's where Win 10k wins as it manages to scale only the 4k and keep the other screen 'unscaled'
Other than that, Cinnamon does a good job IMO

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there, numbnuts.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

"25 years with Linux, however, and i'm not giving up now..."

Sunk cost fallacy.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2...

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

"Good job jackass"

  Insults and abuse don't help people to be less insulting and abusive.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't help though if you're using GNOME.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread is the Linux community in a nutshell.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

25 years with Linux, however, and i'm not giving up now...

Try KDE. It isn't perfect, but it's got the best high-DPI scaling of any Linux DE, and arguably (in some ways, not all ways) better than Windows. I can't compare to OSX since I've never tried that.

There are a few rough edges to it, but generally KDE works fairly well when you crank the DPI.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like the typical Windows user, spending 25 years on an operating system and not accumulating any valuable experience, scripts, or infrastructure.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.

Re:It's a shame

[tbuddy]

They can be helpful in channeling my inner douchebag. With the help of insults I went from a nitwit to a shitcock in just a few short years.

Re:It's a shame

[tbuddy]

Apple does it well. Old applications can be kind of wonky with it. Had some issues with Adobe Acrobat plugins not working in scaled mode. As much as I'd love Acrobat to die in a fire I need it for the very plugin it doesn't work in.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Less talkie-talkie, more sucky-sucky, my peen ain't gonna suck itself!

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a tech news website. I expect people that post their opinions here on Linux to know what apt get does.

The real insult is wasting everyone else's time.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of old applications, i.e. 32-bit, are doomed on the Apple platform. On the surface that might not seem such a bad thing, but I fear many plug-ins and other stuff people don't know they depend on are gonna break. Just because some software is no longer actively supported don't means it's not damn useful.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy being a shitcock, but my wife isn't as open to the idea as often as I'd like. Maybe a little more wine tonight, and we'll see what transpires.

Re:It's a shame

[barbariccow]

Bad news, this person was using Ubuntu so probably was not aware that Linux was anything but an alternate desktop environment for "the cpu."

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is important enough, the author (or those who inherit the source code) will take the effort to rewrite.

Granted, this isn't for every single edge case use out there, but it is true for the important and profitable pieces of software.

For all other cases, you can always create a VM and install whatever old OS you need to run in order to use that ancient piece of code. Where there's a will...

Re:It's a shame

[Highdude702]

Ive been using KDE since the late 90's. And in my opinion it is better than the rest unless you want to get something that's able to be super personalized like enlightenment. As far as KDE goes, their Plasma desktop is turning out to be quite nice. Still with very little overhead, as normal, especially compared to gnome or unity.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE's HiDPI scaling is as good as Unity's if not better. Also, why didn't you continue to use Unity? If you upgraded, Unity is still a desktop option, but my guess is that you are trolling or lazy.

That right there is the pinnacle of Linux community engagement: narcissisticly talking down to people to satisfy the needs of your smug superiority complex.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, use Linux! If you have any problems it's probably because you're fucking retarded!

Re:It's a shame

[exomondo]

Windows 10 can somehow figure out if i'm using my laptop with a 4k 27" screen, or with a 1600x1200 21" screen (I have the 21" at work). Once logged in, the scaling matches between both screens. It "just works". Ubuntu has *never* done this, on any screen setup i've had.

Windows used to be fucking terrible at this and the only one that seemed to do a good job of it was OSX but Windows 10 certainly does seem to have gotten it sorted for the most part, obviously the various application GUI frameworks makes it somewhat more challenging but it's getting better and better. Still haven't found a Linux DWM that handles this well (perhaps there is one though?), though then there is the problem of even more GUI frameworks on Linux than there are on Windows or Mac.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like the typical Windows user, spending 25 years on an operating system and not accumulating any valuable experience, scripts, or infrastructure.

Because I want to run applications so I can use my computer to do the things I need to do, I don't want operating system specific "experience, scripts or infrastructure", nor should I need them. Scripts can be useful but using a cross-platform language like Python is a better option than tying yourself to a particular operating system.

Re: It's a shame

[cyber-vandal]

Try using it with multiple screens on a Surface Book and watch it get very confused

Re:It's a shame

[Dutch Gun]

Generally speaking, as a software developer (I'm currently working on a cross-platform game), I try to leave my development systems as close to stock as possible on the platforms my customers are likely to be using. That means I use Windows 10, macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) w/ the default Unity desktop. I'll probably create a new Unity partition for 17.xx soon, and I'll certainly be leaving it with the stock desktop. This gives me the greatest chance of reproducing application bugs on these systems, and it also helps keep my development machines as stable as possible.

Whenever Windows 8 apologists said something like "stop complaining, you can just install xxx plugin to get your start menu back", they were completely missing the point. You shouldn't HAVE to customize your OS to get it to a practical, working state. Moreso, my experience is that every sort of major modification you make to your system simply increases the likelihood of introducing stability issues, causing strange application bugs, and all other sorts of headaches. Now, each time you ask for advice from someone, you have to explain "I'm not running the default environment", and the likelihood of getting problems resolved decreases.

So, complaints about a default desktop environment aren't necessarily lazy or trolling, even if there are workarounds. There really shouldn't be any excuse for a user to experience a sub-optimal desktop environment these days, especially in one of the world's most popular Linux distros.

Re:It's a shame

[Dutch Gun]

Whoops. That should read: "I'll probably create a new Ubuntu partition for 17.xx soon..."

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Ubuntu isn't real Linux and its users are stupid! Also Android users are not real Linux users either. Real Linux users compile Gentoo with Xmonad for a Loongson-based system! Don't understand that? FUCK YOU IDIOT!

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Call a busters.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is something like Kubuntu (an Ubuntu distro with KDE instead of Unity or Gnome) any different from Windows 8 with Classic Shell? Or are you saying distros like Kubuntu are just pointless?

Re:It's a shame

[exomondo]

It would make sense to still do that now.

Re:It's a shame

[Dutch Gun]

So how is something like Kubuntu (an Ubuntu distro with KDE instead of Unity or Gnome) any different from Windows 8 with Classic Shell? Or are you saying distros like Kubuntu are just pointless?

I wouldn't call it pointless, but my belief is that every variation you introduce to a complex system increases the chances of some odd interaction leading to bugs or instability, so there's a tradeoff to be made there.

One of the difficulties of developing for Linux is the ridiculous number of distros to test for. In practice, what this means is that more "alternative" distros like Kubuntu may simply get little to no QA time at all. So it's more of a "hope this works for you - run at your own risk" sort of scenario. That's probably fine for advanced users who are savvy enough to switch distros or desktops if needed, but I'm not sure that's great advice for all users.

Re:It's a shame

[Gavagai80]

Guess what? A lot of Linux users don't want other people to start using Linux. More mainstream users = more pressure to be like mainstream OSes, more people who don't know what they're doing, more "user friendly" solutions that involve making everything less configurable.

Re: It's a shame

[mysticgoat]

Until parent post, I was unaware that 2SN was a recognized gender. See wire-wrapped rubber hose. (The diameters might be small, but look at the burst pressures! 23,200 psi in the quarter inch! Now that's some serious sex appeal!)

--

Sign me Prob'ly clueless in PDX

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

The GUIs for it suck, as always. Try xrandr.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu MATE has HiDPI support now, too, though I can't speak to how well it works firsthand. If you choose "Mutiny" in the Mate-Tweak utility, you get a desktop just like Unity :)

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hey, use Linux! If you have any problems it's probably because you're fucking retarded!

I think I've seen you on StackOverflow.

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Their comment, and yours, makes use of gender neutral pronouns and so do meet current inclusiveness requirements. You should have made the joke about recompiling the kernel, but your hate just couldn't contain itself.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got other problems. She never tells me no.

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel nothing but hate coming from the hypocritices who would force "inclusiveness" down our collective throat. It's almost as if they cared far more about destroying traditional culture than about their ostensible goal of including more people.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a fallacy if there is also a cost to moving away

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

No you didn't.

Re:It's a shame

[Pseudonym]

This is a tech news website. I expect people that post their opinions here on Linux to know what apt get does.

There's a difference between knowing what apt get does and knowing why someone should prefer kubuntu-desktop that over the dozen or so competitor packages (this is Linux, after all) which purport to solve the same problems.

Re:It's a shame

[Pseudonym]

Or possibly LKML.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I can happily say that desktop scaling sucked *ss on Unity and has merely switched to sucking the dog's bollocks under Gnome.

If you think the latter is preferable, you are one sick puppy. Screwed the pooch there, dude.

Re: It's a shame

[Hognoxious]

They won't fork the the thread because they don't know how. They'll sure talk about it at great length, though.

Re:It's a shame

[erko]

Not creating Unity was the ideal solution from the beginning.

Creating your own display stack and maintaining it forever is an unaffordable choice.
Joining forces with Gnome was a good idea at the time, but if I recall correctly, there were disagreements, and agreeing on things isn't easy.

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try Debian

It runs basically the same as Ubuntu but letâ(TM)s you choose in the installer if you want gnome or KDE or even Cinnamon, I think. Iâ(TM)m going to use Debian on my next install.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive been using KDE since the late 90's. And in my opinion it is better than the rest unless...

Unless you have to work with virtual machine desktops at all, in which case KDE is the only Linux desktop I know of that still has no way to allow a virtual machine to properly grab the Windows/Super key when it has focus so that the KDE launcher doesn't grab it as well.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

While Python eases the pain there is still a million Windows issues it cannot fix. Eg: lack of usable command line, lack of built in ssh, IIS aka "add a page incorrectly and the whole thing stops working", lack of signals, impossible to kill process by name (see command line), "you are not authorized to open a file you just created", need to purchase MSVC++ of a very specific version to compile Python libs, etc. Windows was not conceived as a production-worthy OS, and will never reach this milestone because that is not their business objective.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You are deflecting. The OP indicated he did not like Gnome and knew of other options but he did not know he could install them himself.

He did not know that he could even install the baseline software of a Linux system.

That in itself is fine. What is not fine is to go onto a tech news site and post opinions about a system without knowing the basics that are typically learned in the first ten minutes.

Would you find it acceptable for a forum on auto mechanics to upvote a person complaining that their new Ford Focus ran out of gas, that is why he switched back to his golf cart?

Re:It's a shame

[fireman sam]

Actually his message was fairly clear in that Ubuntu's primary audience are not the "1337" hackers that like to build their own kernels, or swap desktop environments every other day, but rather those people who just want something other than windows on their system.

So perhaps we should say that you who hide behind the anonymous coward, go and live your life in your mom's basement cursing all the noobs who will destroy Linux for you by wanting a default desktop that doesn't suck balls.

Re: It's a shame

[fireman sam]

You forgot the "H" for the heterosexual community. If they want to be inclusive, they really should include everyone.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC som years back Gnome developers hard coded the X setting to 96 dpi because âoesome displays do not report a correct dpi valueâ. Hence the many different settings for text scaling, menu scaling, etc. Firefox has a âoepixels per pixelâ option... Basically Gnome developer are drinking hard from their own cool aid, determined to re-invent the wheel whenever possible. Using a triangle.

Re: It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Try KDE neon as well.

Re:It's a shame

[tsa]

The reason why I went to Mac is that the Linux community for some reason can not decide on a standard desktop environment, which is why most companies didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole when I left.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Mint! It's built on Ubuntu and a lot of common-user stuff is already included.

Re: It's a shame

[fisted]

Die CIS scum.

Re:It's a shame

[fisted]

True, but too fucking late.

Re:It's a shame

[Dasher42]

That's right, because other people deciding what they like makes your favorite open source disappear. Like, how KDE went away because Gnome started. ;)

Seriously, if a bunch of new users come on board and use Mint, they'll be all the more open to a better engineered solution. The real point is to have open source solutions that compete on merit rather than corporate marketing and lock-in.

Re:It's a shame

[Dog-Cow]

Weird. So it does a good job even though it gets the job 50% wrong. I hope I am never beholden to any work you've done.

Re:It's a shame

[Dog-Cow]

It would be a good thing for the world if you were strangled in your sleep. By your mother.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably shouldn't be using 'bollocks' unless you're actually British. 'The dog's bollocks' means something good.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Its a shame they did not stick with Gnome 2 style Gnome back in the days, or Ubuntu could have forked it like Mint did.

Gnome 3 was such a step backwards that I went to Mint and MATE (Gnome 2) for a couple of years. Never used Unity.
The worst thing in my use that Gnome 3 did was removing the Tree View Mode from Nautilus! Went to read the dev discussion of that decision, and the reason they had was "nobody uses that anyway" and "it looks really bad on tablets". Like, WTF? That is a good reason to remove an integral feature of the file manager!

Thank god that Mint people forked Nautilus into Nemo, and Nemo still has tree view! So now I run Xubuntu LTS with XFCE as the desktop, with Nemo installed as an additional file manager. On all of my 3 desktops and 3 laptops :) Good thing XFCE has not been infected with tabletitis or phoneitis, or any other modern bullshit. They are still just an usable, basic desktop, same as it ever was. And not too resource hungry either.

But yes, I would like it a lot more if I didn't need to tweak things like this from the stock install...

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right about plugins and mods. They are a trick for software and game companies to both eat their cake and save it.
- "Something does not work? It's not our bug, uninstall plugins and try again."
- "The software is lacking features? There are plugins/mods which have the features you need."

The end result from this is shitty software which has either features or stability but not both at the same time.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is going to be using Wayland in the future (welcome to no good proprietary drivers and useless open source drivers)

Re:It's a shame

[polyp2000]

Yep I'm very disappointed with 17.10 dual / hybrid GPU supported is now completely fucked and worked perfectly before. XPS15 (9530) I too find the scaling options poor and the touchscreen support is patchy at best. Worst Ubuntu release in years.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is going to switch over to wayland

Re:It's a shame

[andydread]

that is if the Gnome folks accepted any patches from outside. the freedesktop.org people are notoriously difficult to work with.

Re:It's a shame

[LQ]

Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.

I've been using Linux for decades but this attitude always puzzles me. Most folk don't have the skill, time or energy to integrate the applications they want with a different flavour of desktop. In the mainstream, you take the desktop you're offered with the applications which are integrated for that distro. FWIW, I switched to Mint to avoid Unity.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason I use Linux is that the community is not run by petty minded idiots like you that can't stand to use things that haven't been endorsed by the herd.

Re:It's a shame

[luis_a_espinal]

Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.

I've been using Linux for decades but this attitude always puzzles me. Most folk don't have the skill, time or energy to integrate the applications they want with a different flavour of desktop. In the mainstream, you take the desktop you're offered with the applications which are integrated for that distro. FWIW, I switched to Mint to avoid Unity.

That's why I don't even bother anymore with Linux "desktop". I use it exclusively for server side stuff. Every damned linux distro has its own way of doing things and their own GUIs for administering a system (I don't even bother using them, command line purity, baby.)

For desktop, Windows or Mac. Change code, do limited compilation or testing. Push code to git or whatever. Ssh to linux server. Pull code down. Run full build, etc. Happy? Push to integration branch and let CI builds have it.

And that's for work. Let us not talk about media consumption. Linux lost that battle a long time ago.

Re:It's a shame

[hcs_$reboot]

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

KDE interface is in many ways more attractive than Gnome. However, after spending quite some time sifting the forums, it seems KDE is more buggy overall. I chose reliability over design, ie Gnome.

Re:It's a shame

[luis_a_espinal]

Generally speaking, as a software developer (I'm currently working on a cross-platform game), I try to leave my development systems as close to stock as possible on the platforms my customers are likely to be using. That means I use Windows 10, macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) w/ the default Unity desktop. I'll probably create a new Unity partition for 17.xx soon, and I'll certainly be leaving it with the stock desktop. This gives me the greatest chance of reproducing application bugs on these systems, and it also helps keep my development machines as stable as possible.

Whenever Windows 8 apologists said something like "stop complaining, you can just install xxx plugin to get your start menu back", they were completely missing the point. You shouldn't HAVE to customize your OS to get it to a practical, working state. Moreso, my experience is that every sort of major modification you make to your system simply increases the likelihood of introducing stability issues, causing strange application bugs, and all other sorts of headaches. Now, each time you ask for advice from someone, you have to explain "I'm not running the default environment", and the likelihood of getting problems resolved decreases.

So, complaints about a default desktop environment aren't necessarily lazy or trolling, even if there are workarounds. There really shouldn't be any excuse for a user to experience a sub-optimal desktop environment these days, especially in one of the world's most popular Linux distros.

I totally agree with this. I work in multi-platform turn-key/COTS systems and variations of these kinds are a pita. Not only for development but for automated regression builds. We have to have sufficient permutations reflecting system changes to get some level of confidence. Worst migration we had was to adapt our systems to work on RH6 and RH7.

And that's on headless systems. Desktop changes are a PITA. Shit stops working all of the sudden because your system depends on A which depends on B which depends on C to behave a certain way (which no longer does.) Heisenbugs and Mandelbugs galore.

Re:It's a shame

[bluefoxlucid]

I've studied buy-in and stakeholder management as specific technical skills. I'm well-aware that there's such a thing as "difficult to work with", although it's sort of relative.

Re:It's a shame

[tepples]

So on what criteria should an application developer choose a toolkit? Or is it expected that users of desktop GNU/Linux will have all toolkits (GTK+, Qt, Wine, Mono, etc.) installed in order to run all applications?

Re:It's a shame

[fluffernutter]

Lol... and then be prepared to not be able to drag and drop icons from a KDE finder to a Gnome app and lose pretty much every other desktop integration.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually his message was fairly clear in that Ubuntu's primary audience are not the "1337" hackers that like to build their own kernels, or swap desktop environments every other day, but rather those people who just want something other than windows on their system.

Oh come on, you cant genuinely genuinely tell you me you actually read his characterization that Ubuntu users are the sort of people that don't understand Linux being "anything but an alternate desktop environment for "the cpu."" as not condescending elitism, you are just being intentionally obtuse.

So perhaps we should say that you who hide behind the anonymous coward, go and live your life in your mom's basement cursing all the noobs who will destroy Linux for you by wanting a default desktop that doesn't suck balls.

Why would you say that? I never suggested that a default desktop that doesn't suck would be a bad thing, I believe quite the opposite in fact. Nor do I believe the presence or absence of it does anything related to "destroy Linux" for me or anybody else.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

While Python eases the pain there is still a million Windows issues it cannot fix.

Yes but ultimately the fundamental things like hardware and software support are far better on Window and Mac than they are on Linux and certainly Linux, like Windows and macOS, is FAR from being free of issues and quirks, they're just different ones.

All things being equal at the most fundamental reason for the existence of an operating system for the user i.e. running programs on computer hardware you can start to dissect the choice on the merits of the sort of quirks you point out but Linux on the desktop is still a long way from being comparable in terms of hardware and software support in real world usage.

Re:It's a shame

[RockDoctor]

General hint for interacting with Linux - any problem which results in you thinking "I'm going to have to re-install Windows" is a problem with a different solution which does not involve installing Windows. More likely than not, several different solutions.

Finding a relevant solution for your problem ... rather harder, because there is no one vendor, and so no one place to ask for help. But that is what search engines are designed for.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your mom's Macbook and go back to Starbucks and write another manifesto for a useless nonprofit, you hipster faggot.

Re:It's a shame

[Hognoxious]

knowing what apt get does

It says:
E: Invalid operation get

Something, something, Dark Side

[DontBeAMoran]

Something, something, systemd.

clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

unity's demise seems like a good thing to this Xfce user who washed his hands of unity, gnome3, and kde4/5

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Xubuntu user here. Not sure what I'm missing out on by using XFCE. Does what I need.

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[Lord Kano]

I'm thankful for TDE. Gnome and KDE4 nearly ended my pursuit of a linux desktop.

LK

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thankful for TDE. Gnome and KDE4 nearly ended my pursuit of a linux desktop.

LK

never heard of TDE, thank you. i've heard people here say that kde 3 was the best, so i will check it out because it's a fork of kde 3.5. again, thank you!

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[OneHundredAndTen]

Xubuntu user here. Not sure what I'm missing out on by using XFCE. Does what I need.

Exactly! The self-appointed UI "experts" behind Gnome, KDE and Unity seem to be convinced that there is something horribly incomplete, nay, wrong, about such more traditional desktop environments, which warrants the complete redesign that those three monstrosities entail.

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if each of the developers of the 125,867 different Linux DE's instead collaborated on making one or two DEs that were really good...

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[sheph]

You would of course have to persuade them to agree. Good luck with that.

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[Monster_user]

Imagine if Microsoft focused on one GUI that was *ahem* "very good".

Instead of having a seperate UI and platform for say, Windows Phone, Zune, tablets, and desktops.

They might actually create a UI everyone loves!

Oh. Wait,... Nevermind,...

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. My GNOME-2 aka MATE-1.18 provides flawless performance. Extended by PALE MOON one need not look further. Best to send Canonical another ( $50-$100 ) support-check for their faithful vigorous push toward v_18.04 LTS. Pay for what you use pad'res.

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only RES would play nice with pale moon.

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[Gavagai80]

Imagine if each of the developers of the 125,867 different Linux DE's instead collaborated on making one or two DEs that were really good...

Do you seriously think there's such a thing as an objectively good DE? What's good for one person is bad for another, that's why we have options.

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[mysticgoat]

Studio Ubuntu user here. That's xubuntu tweaked for low latency which is needed in audio recording. I don't work with the audio studio apps, but this package comes with Inkscape, Blender, etc, and it seems like the low latency speeds up rendering somewhat.

I run this same package on a 16" laptop, 10" tablet, as well as my 27" quadcore desktop with no problems other than the obvious limitations (tablet and laptop suck at video editing, etc).

I don't do games; I don't need a freaking 4K display. I could use faster render times, but the way to get there is to set up a dedicated render farm rather than a bigger machine, and that render farm can use cheap, outmoded machines (soon as I talk the household into letting me have shelf space). Basically my computers are pickup trucks where what is important is towing capability and max payload. Not speed and bling. The fellow with "25 years with Linux" has nothing to say that has any value in my work.

Re:clearly have no commercial angle

[Lord Kano]

You're welcome.

I found TDE a few years ago when I was bemoaning the streaming pile of excrement that was KDE4.

One of the first things I do when setting up a new Linux desktop is install TDE.

LK

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[Hognoxious]

True, but he has a point - how many niches/use cases are there?

1) Lightweight.
2) Easy - looks like Win XP so Aunt Mary doesn't get confused.
3) OMG Shiny
4) Construction toy for 733t h4xorz to tinker with.
5) Shite for stoking developers' egos.

Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

TBH I am glad Unity is gone; Gnome was always the better choice, and it was annoying to have to manually install Gnome or use a non-standard version of Ubuntu every time I install the OS. Obviously this is only my opinion, I am not saying that Unity fans are wrong, or anything like that.

Re:Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this is only my opinion, I am not saying that Unity fans are wrong, or anything like that.

Why are you posting AC if you're going to be so non-confrontational and bloody polite? What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You said it - glad Unity is gone, Gnome always the better choice - of course you meant to say Unity fans suck monkey ass! Grow a pair and stop trying to give ACs a good name.

Re:Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 has always been a turd controlled entirely by redhat

Re:Unity

[Hognoxious]

TBH I am glad Unity is gone; Gnome was always the better choice

That's like saying Bashful is taller than Doc.

Even with what remains, profitability a challenge.

[Junta]

So Ubuntu Phone was an unmitigated commercial flop (as was Ubuntu on the TV). Ubuntu as a supported desktop OS is just not a prospect anyone is about to pay for.

So they can trumpet their share of cloud instances. That's a nice looking metric for them sure enough, but the whole reason is because they are the no-fuss no-cost option. It has not translated to people paying Canonical for much as of yet. They have been trying to drive this up from the instances to the infrastructure where there *could* be some consulting money to be had, but that has not been a huge commercial success as of yet.

Similarly, they can court IoT, but again we are talking about companies that shave every last fraction of a cent possible from their cost, volumes are extremely high and any cost is not tolerated. Popularity comes by being the no cost option. You may say 'quality', but that random ass yocto build you cobbled together seems good enough, fits in your memory footprint, and without paying anyone to do it for you. Sure your home grown is crap and will probably bite you in the ass down the road, but every penny counts and your device is probably going to just be rebadged as needed by other companies, so you don't even have much of a reputation to protect, statistically speaking of IoT device makers.

Despite some respectable technical effort and good judgement about what is and is not appropriate in a release cycle, as a business endeavor I think they are deeply challenged to find an 'in'.

Redhat with apt

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway Linux nowadays is Redhat-with-yum Vs Redhat-with-apt so who cares ? Big corporations took over, worship Holy Lenny, laugh at CVEs, embrass dynamic users and stfu.

Re:Redhat with apt

[31eq]

embrass v. to embarrass with an embrace

Re:Redhat with apt

[Anonymous Coward]

embrass 2. to surround with euphoniums.

Re:Redhat with apt

[barbariccow]

archlinux.org

Desktop and phone are totally different experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to unify them is a false economy. You'll just make both experiences worse.. Look at Windows phone..

is in rude health

[Anonymous Coward]

is in rude health

wtf does that even mean. can slashdot employ someone in a role that modifies written content in a way which is consumable to a majority of the site's audience? idk what they would call that but they need it.

Re: is in rude health

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bfy.tw/Eegs

Re:is in rude health

[Anonymous Coward]

just fucking google it rather than proudly proclaim your ignorance

Re:is in rude health

[Desler]

It’s a British idiom.

Re:is in rude health

[Anonymous Coward]

It means it's high stepping it up the hill

Re: is in rude health

[Monster_user]

I just figured "rude" meant "cocky", "belligerent", "arrogant", "prideful", "confident", "narcissistic", "boasting".

So I figured it meant they "rub it in your face", rather than being humble and discreet about their own health.

Gnome has a lot of work

[Anonymous Coward]

After upgrading to 17.10, I attempted to use the Gnome shell and it was completely unusable for development purposes. The screen wouldn't even resize properly in VMWare. Looks unfinished.

Re:Gnome has a lot of work

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried out Ubuntu 17.10 including their GNOME modification but I've used GNOME a lot on both Fedora and CentOS under virtualization and have had no problem with that. Ubuntu ships a lot of modifications by default with their version of GNOME, maybe you can try the vanilla gnome-session instead just for comparison?

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[Anonymous Coward]

I use VMware everyday for work in the latest stable version of Gnome. Get good, dude.

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[cyber-vandal]

This is why Linux fails on the desktop

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you actually have to understand how the system works to use it? You must be 10 years old with a username like that.

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[cyber-vandal]

No because elitist overgrown adolescents like you put people off.

Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally

I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an Ubuntu user up to the last release before Unity. At that point I jumped ship to Linux Mint, and have been very happy with it since. I don't see myself going back to Ubuntu any time soon either.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Mint built on top of Ubuntu?

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Mint, you're using Ubuntu.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[messymerry]

Ubuntu peaked at 10.04 LTS. It's been pretty much downhill since then... I too flipped to Mint for my daily use machine and have been mostly happy. Caja sometimes sucks and Mint develops idiosyncrasies after a few months of constant use. Mostly though, I like it.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[barbariccow]

Isn't Mint built on top of Ubuntu?

Isn't every distro just a collection of the same base packages, some specific tools, a repo, and an installer?

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agree.

Although, I switched to Mint Mate when support ended for Ubuntu 10.4 LTS and it has been rock solid.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[ChunderDownunder]

In Mint's case, it's an overlay of an additional repo on top of Ubuntu.

Whereas Debian and downstream Ubuntu do NOT share repositories.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Hognoxious]

If you're using Mint, you're using Ubuntu.

Unless it's Mint Debian Edition.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

The first release with Unity included Gnome 2 out of the box (Ubuntu 11.04). It was a great release. Then Mint 13 was a good follow up on that (based on Ubuntu 12.04)

But I almost miss my 11.04. Liked the themes (with Mint you can have to apt-get even basic themes that are not Mint ones pretty much), liked having the gnome 2 versions of games.

Re:I was an Ubuntu user back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu peaked at 10.04 LTS.

10.04 Gnome 2 was my favourite - until 16.04 MATE. For my purposes I find it equal to or slightly better than 10.4 (running on the same old desktop).

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[bluefoxlucid]

It's going to be fun when they try to explain Mir.

Because it's shitty

[Anonymous Coward]

eom

Why is everyone naming everything Unity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a desktop environment, a dependency injection container, or a 3d game engine? None of those successfully "unified" anyhing.

Let's come up with some original project names, you guys.

Public

[Anonymous Coward]

Why make Ubuntu go public.
How would that go. Redhat is profitable, over 1B sales, and has the enterprise marketplace.
What would Unity do?

Re:Public

[Anonymous Coward]

What would Unity do?

Make it go Republic?

Or more likely make it go pubic (as in F~$£ed).

Re:Public

[Desler]

Why go public? It’s so Shuttleworth can cash out.

Re:Public

[barbariccow]

What would Unity do?

Cash-in on a bunch of Wall-Street folk investing without a clue, then ride their golden parachute until it hits pool water. In my response, I assume you meant to type "Ubuntu" and not "Unity." If you're really asking what a program would do when a company goes public well.... it will compute?

I wasted 16 years waiting for desktop linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

But every year they find a new way to wreck it. But with the alternatives being Windows 10, “High” sierra or dying BSD i will have to waste even more years of my life waiting.

Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

... and everyone jumped ship to Linux Mint the instant Ubuntu started using it?

Re:Because Unity was crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Also I'm sure it had nothing to do with their survey recently and most everyone universally hating unity.

Ubuntu waa good for a while as it brought a lot of people to Linux, and help people discover Linux. Its where I started. Then I got tired of it breaking my system every other update (whether it be sound, video, etc), and I moved onto to PCLinuxOS for a while. While Im no expert, at least my Ubuntu system failing to boot, losing sound, dumping me off at a prompt, taught me more about Linux before I moved onto other things.

Re:Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

Modded *down*??? Are you kidding me?

Apparently there's an Ubuntu shill out there with mod points - lol!

Re:Because Unity was crap...

[ChunderDownunder]

The metaphors are non obvious. Canonical tried a bold experiment but most would seem content with a traditional taskbar/system tray inherited from Windows 95.

No menu bar and an app bar that isn't hierarchical. And swiping from sides of a screen to get various elements to show. Fine if you like autohide on Windows, I personally do not.

I flashed Ubuntu Touch from ubports.com recently. Unity 8 is supposed to be designed for phones but it feels weird there too. They might have had more success if they ditched Unity/Mir for something resembling a more orthodox Android-style launcher - which I think Plasma Mobile (KDE/Wayland) attempted.

Re:Because Unity was crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Busted. I did try 17.10 and it is almost usable. Definitely a huge improvement over Unity which was the biggest piece of turd to ever grace the toilet bowl. I hated that I had still to install a bunch of questionable extensions from a website to give Gnome any semblance of customizability.

Emacs.

[JBMcB]

Vi?

Re:Emacs.

[Harold Halloway]

Vi not?

Re:Emacs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi a duck?

Re:Emacs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi a no chicken?

Re:Emacs.

[barbariccow]

I'll match your VI and raise you an Mproved.

Re:Emacs.

[barbariccow]

Also, save the children of Uganda.

Re:Emacs.

[Hognoxious]

Vii

Lubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

LXDE, period

Kind of obvious

[DrXym]

Unity and Mir were an attempt to own a large chunk of the display stack. Made in preparation for when Ubuntu for tablets, phones came out, Ubuntu could release software under a proprietary Canonical licence while their competitors were forced to release under an onerous GPLv3 or pay Canonical not to do so. That's primarily why Intel pulled their support from Mir because their contributions benefited Canonical more than themselves. It's also why Canonical had to take on the burden of making things like GTK, QT work with their software because nobody else in open source was going to help them. And then the mobile plans went nowhere.

So these projects eventually became a money pit and the sensible thing was to dump them. The really sensible thing would have been to not start them in the first place, but I guess we should be thankful again that Ubuntu Linux is converging again instead of diverging.

Re:Kind of obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the hatred towards Canonical and Ubuntu.

About the license, you probably mean Contributor License Agreement, Apache does that, FSF does that, but people hate Canonical's CLA? Why is that?

About forking, people/organization fork software all the time, but when Canonical does that (Mir, Unity, etc) somehow it's bad thing and Canonical is the enemy?

Re:Kind of obvious

[DrXym]

Maybe read the contributor licence agreement and you'll understand. Or read this. If you are Intel or Qualcomm you're not going to help Canonical when they get to enjoy rights to use the code in ways that you yourself do not.

Now compare to Wayland's license which is a drop in replacement for X11. It's a no brainer why Canonical's support dried up.

Been using Ubuntu Mate for quite some time

[cmaurand]

And I like it. Unity was OK, but not great. They could always let Unity fork and let the community maintain it. As fare as desktop usability went, Unity wasn't all that great, but it was usable. I'm more disappointed by Ubuntu's move to become yet another (*yawn*) dysfunctional public company. That's really too bad.

Re:Been using Ubuntu Mate for quite some time

[Anonymous Coward]

I originally moved to ubuntu plus mate PPA to get back to where the system was usable. Unity is garbage. The moving off of a standard environment and rolling your own has done untold damage to Ubuntu both as a distro and as an ecosystem. Just imagine if all of the cost, time and effort put into that piece of garbage that caused people to run to mate and linux mint was used for actually improving the system. we would have reasonable HiDPI now in mate and wouldn't have needed cinnamon. Ego trips cost a boatload of money. Just look at Napoleon and Russia. Same thing. It's cute, but just because you have money doesn't mean your poop don't stink and Unity (the window manager and the philosophical move away from the industry standard) did.

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha nice troll, I almost actually responde.... shit. Dammit.

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same thing Shuttleworth posted back in April when it was announced Canonical would drop Unity and Ubuntu Touch. There is nothing at all added here to that original announcement six months ago.

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

How I wish this were true. I'm a pretty minimal GUI user and having a desktop that looks the same, and behaves pretty much the same, so I could get on with doing what I want to do would be a great thing.

5 years ago, it was all that 3D desktop crap, then we decided that what we needed was "clean" (i.e. not that 3D desktop crap). And now everybody has decided that we are so junked out on phones that we should starting swiping with our mouse.

I get grumpy when they move all the stuff around at the supermarket also.

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[Kjella]

Ubuntu as a supported desktop OS is just not a prospect anyone is about to pay for. (...) So they can trumpet their share of cloud instances. That's a nice looking metric for them sure enough, but the whole reason is because they are the no-fuss no-cost option. It has not translated to people paying Canonical for much as of yet.

So... good for the desktop? I mean Red Hat found their thing and unceremoniously dropped Red Hat Linux (their non-enterprise desktop offering) for a community testbed. As long as Canonical hasn't found its thing they need Ubuntu as marketing, almost every Linux user knows it even if it's not their daily driver. If they become "the cloud distro" and all their paying customers will use it for that anyway they don't need the desktop. Then they could just let Mint, Elementary or openSUSE take over or do a Fedora-style spin-off while they focus on making money.

Unity was the reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity was the reason I dropped Ubuntu.

Re:Unity was the reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 is the reason i'm abandoning Ubuntu

maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its because Unity sucked balls

XFCE or GTFO

I liked the way...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that they put the close box right next to the file menu. Ergonomics without regard to usability.

The snap windows were okay though.

Re:I liked the way...

[Hognoxious]

Ergonomics without regard to usability.

At least one of those words doesn't mean what you think it does.

Used Ubuntu Mate until last week

[Anonymous Coward]

I initially loved the system, but there were various problems (the caja file manager kept locking-up, a problem for many for many years). Then my Inkscape didn't work, even after a complete removal and re-installation. That was the final straw. I'm now on Gnome and getting accustomed to it. P.S. Started with Gentoo more than a decade ago, but it's too much work.

Touch centric

[rtkluttz]

Still sucks balls for real work even after all this time. Both unity and gnome 3 are still absolutely horrible for a real workstation that you sit in front of all day. I'm sorry, but the touch gui people who insist that 5-7 years worth of work can even come close to what mouse and keyboard have evolved and matured into after 40 years? How arrogant can you get? Even newer technologies like voice are going to fail in a real working environment. Its mouse and keyboard for anyone until a true neural interface is working. That will be the only things that tops 40 years worth of experimentation and on the job R&D that mouse/keyboard has seen.

Re:Touch centric

[Parker Lewis]

Sounds like you never used Unity. Unity is not touch centric. Indeed, is the best DE for a keyboard user. No related to Gnome 3 touch UI at all.

Re: Touch centric

[Waveevaw]

I use Gnome 3 without a touchscreen. It looks great, I show it to people who donâ(TM)t know Linux and they are impressed. But thatâ(TM)s besides the point; I have no problem functioning without a touchscreen. In fact I think 90% of my gestures involve Super Key>Start Typing Application/Folder/File>Enter. I must admit though, that I have enabled Desktop Icons. Not sure why they hide those by default because itâ(TM)s probably disorienting to newcomers.

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[sirv]

it is not trolling when it is TRUE

Simple enough

[Zo0ok]

I have been using Xubuntu since many years, and on a few occations Lubuntu (when hardware has been limited).

Windows is not getting more advanced as a "Window Manager" or a "Desktop". Neither is Mac OS X.
Xubuntu used to come with the "Dock" activated by default, now it is not.

Isn't it quite clear that simplicity is the way to go? Some kind of "start menu" for launching applications. Some way to switch between open applications. Some place to display clock and wifi status. And for those who want, drives/folders/files. And search.

Basically Windows NT4 and Mac OS 6 looked like this, and for good reasons.

More advanced Gnome, KDE or anything else seem to have very little purpose and audience.

Re:Simple enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Very much this! I look at most “advances” in various window variants (windows, OS X, gnome, kde etc etc) and for the most part I don’t see much improvement. Some small increments forward, some not so small steps backwards, but mostly just shuffling things around and adding complexity.

When I’m coding I know I’m making good progress when my code starts to get less complex and more clear and structured (and hence faster and more reliable). Same goes for UIs. First Mac desktop? Simultaneously far simpler and more powerful than most of the alternatives. Win xp versus win 3.whatever? Light years better. Windows 10 vs windows xp? Well 10 sure is more complex and intrusive. Ubuntu before, during and post unity? Meh, round and round we go.

Re:Simple enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that.

XFCE has the right idea - if it works, don't bloody well mess with it. Version 4.12 (latest) came out 2 years ago :)
Been using it ever since Ubuntu went to Gnome 3. The only major change they have added in recent years was compositing support, and even that was a good addition and can be trivially turned on and off as needed.

Only thing I added to XFCE was the Nemo file manager (original Gnome 2 file manager that Mint people forked) because Nemo still has Tree View mode that most file managers are missing.

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[barbariccow]

According to http://distrowatch.com/ Mint is already way more popular than ubuntu on the desktop. They are struggling hard to try to find some way to monetize and make proprietary an already free eco system. In my experience, an Ubuntu user is synonymous with someone not understanding anything about Linux but they "heard it was good/easy." What they really need is a backroom deal with some OEM to start pushing their specific repackaging onto machines first-sale. Ubuntu as a server is a joke, and Red Hat already dominates that space. Even though Red Hat's product is mirrored with a free-as-in-beer alternative (CentOS), folks still pay out the ass for support (meaning instead of hiring in-house folks to work on the already open-source software to make it work correctly or troubleshoot your system, you pay Red Hat to care about your problems. ) And they do a pretty good job at that. But for the desktop? Without some shitty not-free (in spirit or otherwise) backroom deal they got nada.

world class enterprise platform?!

[Anonymous Coward]

a world class enterprise platform

Are you fucking kidding me? I have fond memories of canonical not fixing the following (and similar) bugs for years:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/libgcrypt/+bug/423252
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnss-ldap/+bug/1024475

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[AmiMoJo]

If pay a few bucks for Ubuntu if it wasn't shit. I'd love to get off Windows, I'm happy to pay for it, but basic stuff like the mouse and scaling have to work.

Re:I've been using Ubuntu Mate since 15.10

[Anonymous Coward]

but there were various problems (the caja file manager kept locking-up, a problem for many for many years).

I've been using MATE since 15.10 (I'm currently using 16.04.3), and I've never once had anything lock up on me.

What were you doing with it when it locked up? Describe it, and I'll try to reproduce it on my machine.
Also, did you file a bug report? If so, did you include a stack trace of the lock-up?

Re: Even with what remains, profitability a challe

[cyber-vandal]

You just like arguing don't you :P

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure i would agree that it's dead, but it's certainly stagnated. The GUIs all look awfully dated or are half-assed attempts to copy Windows and macOS and no matter what you choose it is horribly inconsistent across applications.

Part of the problem is that by and large the Linux community evangelists just get upset when you point this out.

Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

... and everyone jumped ship to Linux Mint the instant Ubuntu started using it?

Posting again since the first post was modded down by an Ubuntu shill with mod pts...

Got any more buddy?

Re: Even with what remains, profitability a challe

[Monster_user]

Uhm, not sure why anybody needs Red Hat to officially support a distribution. We only pay $365 per year to get security updates.

Kind of a strong arm between a vendor that only supports Red Hat, and RedHat charging for what Microsoft provides for "free". I doubt we are paying $365 per year per server for Windows Server licensing.

Otherwise I would have run Ubuntu or CentOS. I prefer Ubuntu, more familiar with it.

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

When I can have an online list of favorite grocery items and just check off what I want and have it delivered for an even remotely competitive price I'll never go to a grocery store again. Their little "move things around so you have to wander around and hopefully buy more things" shenanigans will have been their comeuppance.

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[Gavagai80]

Distrowatch is not a measure of popularity. It's a measure of how many people on their site haven't heard of a particular distro but are curious to read about it.

Disapointed in Canonical

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft, IBM, and Google are working on getting next level quantum computing to work.
Some companies are working on next level VR to change the world.

Microsoft is working on next level Mixed Reality (AR + VR) along with Machine Learning A.I.

Canonical is working on trying to bring a company public using an old UI and an average version of Linux.

Talk about a waste of money, Mark. You are wealthy. Use your money to change the world or change people's lives, not building a UI.

Linux is not a desktop OS

[sirv]

Look at Munich Linux Disaster. Linux is not a desktop OS.

Re:Linux is not a desktop OS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd. I have been using it on all my desktops for years and not a single usability issue.

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[Hognoxious]

There's a desktop variant of RHEL - called WS. Did you think "enterprise" implied "on a server"?

The decline and fall of slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr summary doesn't describe what Unity is. I thought it was a gaming platform. This is something else. Is it?
 
Msmash if you are going to post such stupid lost summaries at least make sure there's a summary in there somewhere.

Re:The decline and fall of slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity is Cannonical's money pit, also known as a desktop environment that was supposedly optimised for touch interface. Seeing how Ubuntu has zero market share on touch devices, both Unity and the idea behind it was a fiasco. A desktop environment can be replaced with a different one like Gnome, KDE, Mint, XFCE, etc with a single command.

Re: Even with what remains, profitability a challe

[Dog-Cow]

Unless you hire away Red Hat devs to be your support team, you're going to get better and cheaper support if you pay Red Hat instead of paying employee salaries. Some companies using Red Hat (or SLES) have a few thousand servers to support. They don't want to waste time on someone who messes around with RHES or SLES in their spare time. They want the experts.

Because they didnt develop them in the open

[jgfenix]

Even if Red Hat is the main contributor or hire the main developers of some open source projects there are many "external" contributions. Canonical didnt take advantage of this because they wanted to control everything. Those projects didnt have to be a money sink.

Red Hat know how to benefit from the community the most. Thats the biggest difference between them.

Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[sirv]

you hit the nail on the head, sir .

Too much development investment for Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that Unity was simply too expensive to continue. Many things failed to materialize for Ubuntu in mobile and frankly while Linux may not be dead on the desktop. It's certainly not winning over that many. Using something like Gnome that is well developed in the Linux community saves money.
I think in myself Unity probably chased away as many Ubuntu users as it kept. But also this is less of a big deal then some make it out to be.

Its a bit rough around the edges

[MichaelSmith]

In comparison to Unity there is a lot of stuff not working on gnome, like power management and hibernation.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Death to unity!

[hemna]

One of the best decisions ever by Canonical is to drop that failed UI. IT was a complete cluster F, from the very beginning. The ui itself was awful. BYE!

sustainable, huh?

[cryptogranny]

> Shuttleworth explains: "One of the things I'm most proud of is in the last 7 years is that Ubuntu itself became completely sustainable." Man, do you know that sustainable is not about you but about how often your project changes hourses? I gave up on your Ubuntu ambitions long before now. When you anounced the convergence idea it was obvious that in a market of Android and Windows you don't have a chance. Now you drop it. Seems like I have more sense then Ubuntu leader, so why follow?

Please do not bring these form factors together

[Tough Love]

Sorry Mark, I do not share your enthusiasm for bringing form factors together, instead I regard that idea as a blight that has made both large and small form factors worse, especially the large form factor where I spend the bulk of my actual productive time.

Well, here I am, back to Debian and it feels good. Silver lining: it appears that competition with Ubuntu made Debian stronger, thanks for that.

Re:Please do not bring these form factors together

[Tough Love]

Oh wait, I just realized this article needs a car analogy. We should bring bicycle, sedan and semitrailer form factors closer together! Chew on it, Mark.

Re:Please do not bring these form factors together

[Hognoxious]

Using the same interface for a tablet and a desktop is like steering an oil-tanker with handlebars.

Because unity always sucked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu was stupid to believe unity would be adopted by the community wider linux community. It sucked, it always sucked, and it always will.