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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.

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's a shame by slacka · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

  2. Re:It's a shame by barbariccow · · Score: 0, Flamebait

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

  3. Because Unity was crap... by JoeDuncan · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    ... 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?