
Ubuntu abandons its phone efforts, will switch back to Gnome – The Verge - rbanffy
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/4/5/15198178/ubuntu-abandons-phone-moves-back-to-gnome
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matt_kantor
Could we get this URL changed to the original blog post[0] and the title
changed accordingly?

[0]: [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-
cl...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-
iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/)

~~~
rbanffy
Sorry. Your request came after the edit window closed and I was most probably
sleeping.

~~~
matt_kantor
Looks like there was already a submission of the original blogpost[0]; I just
missed it.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631)

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amiga-workbench
Are we forever going to be stuck with dumbed down, crippled hyper-consumerized
phone OS's?

Meego died, Sailfish is bordering on irrelevency, Plasma mobile isn't going
anywhere, and now Ubuntu mobile isn't happening.

~~~
m_mueller
Isn't Microsoft still in a good position to bring a full features desktop OS
to smartphones once their ARM port is complete? I for one am not big into
Windows, but if MS continues their current path of integration on continuity I
could see it getting to a certain point of "critical mass" where people can
have one digital environment for work, leisure times mobilr and stationary and
do everything anywhere. Both iOS and Android seem ill suited for that.

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kerneldeveloper
I think some people may want to take over Unity 8 and continue developing it.
An obvious characteristic of the open source community is divergence, which
means forking an existing project or reinventing wheels. Although I'm a GTK
developer, I also think Unity is a good desktop environment because of its
usability to the non-technical user. But, I still don't like the Canonical's
work style that reinvents too many things, such as Bazaar. I like Launchpad
for its convenience, while I think Bazaar is awful compared with Git.

~~~
rleigh
Bazaar (bzr) had valid reasons for existing. It predated git and mercurial,
being based upon GNU Arch (tla) and baz. At the time, it was pretty cutting
edge. While it was eclipsed by later arrivals, we weren't to know that without
the benefit of hindsight.

While I never used it, being a tla user at that point in time, I would not
criticise it as not being worthwhile or being a pointless reinvention, since
it was neither.

Divergence isn't always bad. It's often needed to make any forward progress
when the incumbents have stagnated. I'm grateful for all projects which
attempt to push the boundaries. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
Bazaar didn't, and now it seems Unity didn't. But both were worth the effort
put into them.

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Stranger43
A bit of background that seams to get lost in the noise is that Unity8(that
only ever shipped on mobile) was QT based where as the Uninty7 that still
drives the desktop is GTK based?

I wonder if he really meant gnome-shell or just the platform(as unity7 already
is) when he claimed that 18.04 would be based on gnome?

On a unrelated note as an owner of(a now flashed to android) Ubuntu tablet i
think they made the right choice here as the thing was lacking tablet mode
without being a viable laptop/desktop replacement.

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didibus
Unity 8 looked like a much better unity. Also, gnome 3 is actually weirder
then unity was at first, and I think it got unfair backlash for being the
first to converge.

My current favorite is KDE Plasma though. It's changed the game for me.
Desktop OS all the way, tablets and phones just don't need the same apps and
UX. I think convergence can wait or simply doesn't need to happen.

~~~
toyg
Funny you say that: KDE 4+ was all about convergence. Then all tablet and
phone efforts based on it failed pretty spectacularly, and eventually the KDE
folks kinda accepted the hard truth that Microsoft also had to swallow:
consumers don't care about convergence, what they care about is having the
right UI on the right device.

