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

Something, something, Dark Side

[DontBeAMoran]

Something, something, systemd.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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.

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: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.