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