Canonical is also ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, spelling doom for the goal of creating a converged experience with phones acting as desktops when docked with the right equipment.
I'm surprised there isn't more discussion here about that part. I'm really saddened to read that. When the project was first unveiled, it looked like exactly the sort of experience I want out of a smartphone.
+1
I had to double check the date to make sure this hadn't been posted on April 1st. I knew it was a ways away but I was looking forward to being able to have an Ubuntu phone.
This! I'm all glad about going back to GNOME and Wayland, but I really hoped Canonical was strong enough to put up a new mobile OS, even if just as a small player. It takes so much time (and money) to do so, and if even Canonical can't do it, I guess we can totally forget about a truly open source mobile OS in the near future, and maybe ever. That's a pretty sad future we're to, IMHO.
The barrier to entry in the smartphone OS market is just too high for a small company to have a chance. Mozilla learned this, and now Canonical has too.
Neglecting the core product to pursue a phone OS that was very unlikely to succeed was bad for the company.
I've always been sceptical of the idea of a converged desktop across different devices. One size just can't fit all in my view. Even a 'hidden' desktop on a mobile phone that reveals itself when docked to a large monitor will still be a constrained experience.
A dedicated desktop OS is capable of rich and complex interactions. Could a mobile 'desktop mode' ever match such capabilities?
I'd rather have a dedicated desktop OS that maximises features suitable for the desktop hardware it runs on. Not an OS that has to lower it's capabilities and interactions to match the smallest device it runs on.
Agree. I was excited for this- even to the point of using and growing to like Unity. (That may not be fair though as I spend a lot of time in xterm so gui isn't so important).
Gnome 3 is the best desktop environment I've ever used - my comment history on HN over the past 5 years definitely indicates as much. I'm not going to claim I've used all of them, but compared to what I've seen in Unity, macOS, and various versions of Windows (except Windows 10, which I have not tried), it's modern, fluid, and intuitive. To see Gnome return to the fold of Ubuntu is a huge deal to me and I couldn't be happier or more excited on this decision. Shuttleworth deserves a lot of praise and admiration for taking this bold (and likely painful) path.
(On a related note, I was reading up on Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel earlier today, and it feels very familiar to this.)
I originally quit Ubuntu because I didn't like Unity ... Gnome is great, I can live with KDE but now I'm moving towards even lighter solutions. I won't miss Unity at all!
"Shuttleworth made it clear that the cloud isn't the financial future of the company. He wrote:
'The <latest-big-idea> story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve.'"
I don't have anything against Ubuntu, but I do have something against chasing the latest fad. I know, the cloud isn't a fad, but mobile wasn't a fad either.
I never liked Unity and I'm comfortable with Gnome, so I think this change is good.
But, fer cryin out loud, Ubuntu, how many goddamn times do you need to change things around? UI? init system? Firewall management? It goes on and on.
This is the stuff of nightmares if you manage more than one distro version, and I feel I'm starting to slowly hate this distribution, even though I use it a lot and it works great (provided you remember which version does what all the time).
Their leadership projects a weak, hesitant image. There's no one at the rudder and the ship is being blown by the winds every which way.
The difference is that Ubuntu is already the de-facto dominant player here. As far as AWS goes, the Canonical Ubuntu AMI is the most popular one, except maybe the default Amazon one.
I don't really think this can be chalked up to chasing fads. Any sane business owner is going to want to spend time and resources going where the money is. He makes it pretty clear in the blog post that cloud and iot is where the money is, and since Canonical is a for-profit entity that's where they've gotta focus their time and effort on.
I don't care about window management, launchers, file browsers and all that other fluff. Usually you can customize that thing by e.g. using a custom launcher.
What I do care about is good hi dpi support, good font rendering, nice consistent controls etc. Somehow it seems that all these Linux window managers are just variations of superficial stuff (multi desktops, launchers, search...).
> What I do care about is good hi dpi support, good font rendering, nice consistent controls etc. Somehow it seems that all these Linux window managers are just variations of superficial stuff (multi desktops, launchers, search...).
Other than hi dpi support, none of that is under the control of desktop environments. And, at least for me, it's mostly fine these days.
This is a bit of a shocker. Mark Shuttleworth's post is worth reading. [1]
I actually liked Unity. There were a lot of reports of it being bloated and laggy but I found the exact opposite when I finally tried it. Unity was lightweight, fast and by far the most polished Linux desktop I have used which made all the bad press a bit mysterious.
There are a lot of folks online who seem to hate Ubuntu with an unusual passion and dismiss its projects as NIH. The key to understanding this is to seek out how many projects by Redhat, Fedora, Freedesktop or the Gnome ecosystem are dismissed as NIH? Zero. This is curious to say the least.
Redhat funds a lot of projects, its become a cathedral in the open source bazaar. The danger of centralization and concentration of power and money is the cathedral then becomes more interested in its own influence than anything it publicly professes.
SystemD is definitely attacked as NIH (and every other pejorative people can think of). And zfs fans say btrfs is NIH, etc, etc. I'd say RedHat gets just as much flak in that regard as Canonical.
Well, this spells bad news for Qt and by extension any non-Gtk Linux environment. I was really hoping there would be more traction behind it to get a better non-C++ dev story; but it seems we're stuck with developing for two separate Linux environments (and other OSes) instead of writing once and having a binary that looks native in every OS with just a few platform-specific stylesheets here and there instead of entirely separate UI codebases.
That's a shame. I prefer the current Unity (16.10) interface to the other available options. It's simple, clean and intuitive IMO.
Haven't looked at Gnome since the disaster that was 3, having previously used it exclusively. Here's hoping it has improved (dramatically) since. Unity is lightyears ahead of where Gnome was last time I checked.
If you've been using unity, you've already been using most of the gnome stack, the main difference being a different shell and window manager on top.
I do slightly prefer unity to gnome (mainly because, in my experience, unity/compiz is has far smoother performance/animations than gnome shell), but gnome is pretty good these days.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the first release of unity was every bit as much of a disaster as gnome 3 was (I remember unity in 11.04, it was buggy and the performance was horrific)
I'm hoping some outsiders (outside redhat/fedora/gnome) will have enough influence to stop some of the dumb things going on with gnome. This could be good for everyone ;-)
Do any other Linux desktop environments show the applications menus in the title bar ( as OSX does ) ? I really like this feature, and Unity does it well.
Unity is easily the best Linux desktop I've used; I've been using Linux as my sole OS for over 10 years and I've tried them all.
I always felt that not liking Unity seemed to be nothing more than the contempt cultures fashionable position to take.
What's with the hatred here? Gnome 3 is a technological disaster and it's extension system a ticking security time bomb. Unity is currently the only usable, modern desktop on Linux that doesn't break two months down the road because of incompatible extensions. On the other hand, maybe Canonical can put some sanity back into project.
Well I'm disappointed about them dropping their phone project. There's too few players in the phone OS market and Android just has a woeful security ecosystem; most shipped devices only receive updates for a year or two at most. I'm still on Android 4.3 and really don't have any trust in my phone.
I'll still hold out hope that someday an OS that is similar enough to desktop Linux - one that can ship updates independent of the carrier or manufacturer - will rise and fill that void.
And it's really unfortunate that more devices aren't more open... considering there are plenty of third party ROMs with newer builds, but only as long as the binary drivers can be ripped out of other devices for new versions.
I've been using mostly devices supported by third party roms from the start, but that doesn't always mean the latest and greatest hardware. Currently on a Nexus 6P and will probably move to Lineage when it's no longer supported.
Thank god. At no point did I like Unity. The way it integrated with the rest of the system seemed broken and all I ever got from it were countless problems.
Really loved Unity for its clean presentation and its emphasis on tiling-through-keyboard-shortcuts, but it was clear I was in a minority. Sad about this, but not shocked.
This is how I feel as well. Unity is trivially configurable to get out of your way: my launcher hides by default, and the menu bar disappears into the title bar, which also contains the clock, battery status, wlan indicator, etc.
I will miss features like that. I hope other DEs incorporate them before Ubuntu drops Unity definitively, or otherwise that the community will keep Unity 7 up-to-date.
Agreed. Wife prefers Unity to Windows 10, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, ad infinitum. Dead simple UI and a google-search method of locating programs is a winning combo.
I am somewhat exercised by this. I like Unity and have grown accustomed to it over the years, and in any case I think having choice in software is a positive thing. I hope that the community will continue development of Unity.
Well, I hope they do not decide to start moving away from desktops.
While I am technically capable of installing most distros or compile my own kernel to enable the modules I need, usually Ubuntu has a good enough default kernel configuration that is compatible with laptops to a level I am satisfied.
It was inevitably. Canonical is too small compared to RH, they have no resources to make something as huge as gnome/wayland/libinput stack by themselves. I'm happy to know that we have a default DE now.
I have grown used to Unity. Now they are stopping development on it? I checked immediately if this was dated April 1st...so this true?
I decided to stick with Unity because hit the sweet-spot for me when it comes to the functionality I actually want in a desktop environment. I was not happy with GNOME 3, nor KDE, nor any other desktop environment I tried. Now Canonical is pulling this again?
I just hope that there will be a UUbuntu flavour for the 18.04 release.
Next up ... will Mir be killed off too? ;) (Whoops ... didn't see that they are killing Mir too... :))
> By switching to GNOME, Canonical is also giving up on Mir and moving to the Wayland display server, another contender for replacing the X window system. Given the separate development paths of Mir and Wayland, "we have no real choice but to use Wayland when Ubuntu switches to GNOME by default," Hall told Ars. "Using Mir simply isn't an option we have."
Killing off Mir would probably be a good idea as well, and just tracking back to Wayland... I also really liked Unity a lot, not as much as the windows start/taskbar, but more than mac's dock.
Hopefully they can do the canonical magic with Gnome 3, without too much reinvention this time.
Are you running KDE Neon? For the longest time I was using Kubuntu until I learned that it uses an ages-old version of KDE. KDE Neon uses a stable Ubuntu core with an up-to-date KDE desktop package.
[+] [-] gshulegaard|9 years ago|reply
This is the second duplicate I have seen today on HN.
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awfgylbcxhrey|9 years ago|reply
I'm surprised there isn't more discussion here about that part. I'm really saddened to read that. When the project was first unveiled, it looked like exactly the sort of experience I want out of a smartphone.
[+] [-] longsigh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoavm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twblalock|9 years ago|reply
Neglecting the core product to pursue a phone OS that was very unlikely to succeed was bad for the company.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|9 years ago|reply
A dedicated desktop OS is capable of rich and complex interactions. Could a mobile 'desktop mode' ever match such capabilities?
I'd rather have a dedicated desktop OS that maximises features suitable for the desktop hardware it runs on. Not an OS that has to lower it's capabilities and interactions to match the smallest device it runs on.
[+] [-] pc2g4d|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhimes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsadi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andrex|9 years ago|reply
(On a related note, I was reading up on Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel earlier today, and it feels very familiar to this.)
[+] [-] smoyer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clock_tower|9 years ago|reply
"Shuttleworth made it clear that the cloud isn't the financial future of the company. He wrote: 'The <latest-big-idea> story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve.'"
I don't have anything against Ubuntu, but I do have something against chasing the latest fad. I know, the cloud isn't a fad, but mobile wasn't a fad either.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
But, fer cryin out loud, Ubuntu, how many goddamn times do you need to change things around? UI? init system? Firewall management? It goes on and on.
This is the stuff of nightmares if you manage more than one distro version, and I feel I'm starting to slowly hate this distribution, even though I use it a lot and it works great (provided you remember which version does what all the time).
Their leadership projects a weak, hesitant image. There's no one at the rudder and the ship is being blown by the winds every which way.
[+] [-] apetresc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
What I do care about is good hi dpi support, good font rendering, nice consistent controls etc. Somehow it seems that all these Linux window managers are just variations of superficial stuff (multi desktops, launchers, search...).
[+] [-] abritinthebay|9 years ago|reply
What they do get opinionated about are things that you mention (multi desktops, launchers, search...) so they work on those.
Not that that is a bad thing as such... but it leads to what you describe.
[+] [-] ori_b|9 years ago|reply
Other than hi dpi support, none of that is under the control of desktop environments. And, at least for me, it's mostly fine these days.
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
I actually liked Unity. There were a lot of reports of it being bloated and laggy but I found the exact opposite when I finally tried it. Unity was lightweight, fast and by far the most polished Linux desktop I have used which made all the bad press a bit mysterious.
There are a lot of folks online who seem to hate Ubuntu with an unusual passion and dismiss its projects as NIH. The key to understanding this is to seek out how many projects by Redhat, Fedora, Freedesktop or the Gnome ecosystem are dismissed as NIH? Zero. This is curious to say the least.
Redhat funds a lot of projects, its become a cathedral in the open source bazaar. The danger of centralization and concentration of power and money is the cathedral then becomes more interested in its own influence than anything it publicly professes.
[1] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...
[+] [-] smitherfield|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixedCase|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3princip|9 years ago|reply
Haven't looked at Gnome since the disaster that was 3, having previously used it exclusively. Here's hoping it has improved (dramatically) since. Unity is lightyears ahead of where Gnome was last time I checked.
[+] [-] bwat49|9 years ago|reply
I do slightly prefer unity to gnome (mainly because, in my experience, unity/compiz is has far smoother performance/animations than gnome shell), but gnome is pretty good these days.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the first release of unity was every bit as much of a disaster as gnome 3 was (I remember unity in 11.04, it was buggy and the performance was horrific)
[+] [-] phkahler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slitaz|9 years ago|reply
Source link.
[+] [-] bingo_cannon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waingake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnonymousPlanet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallacoloo|9 years ago|reply
I'll still hold out hope that someday an OS that is similar enough to desktop Linux - one that can ship updates independent of the carrier or manufacturer - will rise and fill that void.
[+] [-] tracker1|9 years ago|reply
I've been using mostly devices supported by third party roms from the start, but that doesn't always mean the latest and greatest hardware. Currently on a Nexus 6P and will probably move to Lineage when it's no longer supported.
[+] [-] temp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufordsharkley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marten-de-vries|9 years ago|reply
I will miss features like that. I hope other DEs incorporate them before Ubuntu drops Unity definitively, or otherwise that the community will keep Unity 7 up-to-date.
[+] [-] kingmanaz|9 years ago|reply
Personally use FVWM and couldn't be happier.
[+] [-] rbanffy|9 years ago|reply
Apart from that, Gnome is very polished these days.
[+] [-] swhalen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
While I am technically capable of installing most distros or compile my own kernel to enable the modules I need, usually Ubuntu has a good enough default kernel configuration that is compatible with laptops to a level I am satisfied.
[+] [-] ernst_klim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigpeopleareold|9 years ago|reply
I decided to stick with Unity because hit the sweet-spot for me when it comes to the functionality I actually want in a desktop environment. I was not happy with GNOME 3, nor KDE, nor any other desktop environment I tried. Now Canonical is pulling this again?
I just hope that there will be a UUbuntu flavour for the 18.04 release.
Next up ... will Mir be killed off too? ;) (Whoops ... didn't see that they are killing Mir too... :))
[+] [-] rch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|9 years ago|reply
Hopefully they can do the canonical magic with Gnome 3, without too much reinvention this time.
[+] [-] bigpeopleareold|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duiker101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|9 years ago|reply