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

[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]

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

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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[andydread]

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

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'.

Because Unity was crap...

[JoeDuncan]

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

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.

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]

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: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.

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: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: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.

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.