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

[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

[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]

This thread is the Linux community in a nutshell.

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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Hognoxious]

knowing what apt get does

It says:
E: Invalid operation get

Something, something, Dark Side

[DontBeAMoran]

Something, something, systemd.

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'.

Re:Even with what remains, profitability a challen

[bluefoxlucid]

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

Re:Redhat with apt

[31eq]

embrass v. to embarrass with an embrace

Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

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

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: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.

Emacs.

[JBMcB]

Vi?

Re:Emacs.

[Harold Halloway]

Vi not?

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

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

[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:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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:is in rude health

[Desler]

It’s a British idiom.

Re:Public

[Desler]

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

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.

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: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.

Re:Redhat with apt

[barbariccow]

archlinux.org

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: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?

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: Even with what remains, profitability a challe

[cyber-vandal]

You just like arguing don't you :P

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[cyber-vandal]

This is why Linux fails on the desktop

Re: clearly have no commercial angle

[sheph]

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

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: 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.

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: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.

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 liked the way...

[Hognoxious]

Ergonomics without regard to usability.

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

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: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"?

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: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: 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.

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

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.

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.

Re: Gnome has a lot of work

[cyber-vandal]

No because elitist overgrown adolescents like you put people off.

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.