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

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]

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.

Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

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

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread is the Linux community in a nutshell.

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: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: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: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.