
Dozens of Canonical Employees Resign as Ubuntu Switches to Gnome - digitalshankar
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/04/12/1844230/dozens-of-canonical-employees-resign-as-ubuntu-switches-to-gnome-shuttleworth-returns-as-ceo
======
4ad
"Resign". Even the article claims 80 people are axed, not "resigned", and only
one guy resigned. Unless they are using United's definition of "volunteering".

Also, this has nothing to do with switching to Gnome. Employees were axed for
business reasons.

~~~
jug
Also on the RTFA topic:

"The Canonical founder is cutting numbers after an external assessment of his
company by potential new financial backers found overstaffing and that
projects lacked focus."

It may not even have much to do with Mark.

What it looks like to me is that they saw the writing on the wall and knew
this external assessment would lead to changes, and took that opportunity to
execute a CEO switch plan. The reason behind that switch is perhaps seen
above.

------
partycoder
It seems Mark Shuttleworth's strategy for Canonical is expand on support, and
sunset projects to decrease costs. So far: Mir, Unity, Ubuntu mobile, etc.

Now, many people suggest to go directly to Gnome, but in reality you have many
more aditional desktop manager choices on Ubuntu (tried to limit the list to
the ones in active development):

\- GTK based: Gnome, Pantheon, Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE (Gnome 2 fork), XFCE

\- Qt based: KDE, Trinity (KDE 3 fork), LXQt

\- NeXT inspired: GNUStep, Window Maker

\- Others: Enlightment, CDE.

They all have their tradeoffs.

If you are used to the MS Windows look and feel, maybe Cinnamon/LXQt/Trinity
will be the closest.

If you are used to the macOS look and feel, maybe Pantheon or MATE may be
closer.

I personally prefer and use Gnome. The Gnome 3 shell is different from
everything else (Gnome 2 included), but it was designed trying to minimize
distractions. With some tuning
([http://extensions.gnome.org](http://extensions.gnome.org)) you can adapt it
to your needs.

KDE is fine, but most applications I use are GTK based, so I picked a GTK
desktop environment.

XFCE is great and performant but hasn't received many updates lately.
Development is still active though
([https://blog.xfce.org/](https://blog.xfce.org/)).

~~~
rawfan
Mir is still alive and supported.

------
jlgaddis

      $ ping mods
    

This should point directly to the article on The Register [0] instead of being
a link to a Slashdot submission that links to the article.

Maybe update the title to the original one ("Canonical sharpens post-Unity axe
for 80-plus Ubuntu spinners") instead of Slashdot's embellished title, too?

Slashdot's title: "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign ..."

Quoting the article: "One individual has resigned ..."

On a side note, I'm kinda surprised to see that Slashdot actually still
exists.

[0]:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/80_canonical_staff_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/80_canonical_staff_face_chop/)

------
slitaz
Slashdot is not an original source of news, does not offer much insightful
commenting, and they mess up with the titles to provoke clicks.

------
mtgx
I'm sure most of the Mir guys were frustrated and wanted to quit, but to me it
looks like Canonical needed to become much leaner, too, so it had to let some
people go anyway. Perhaps it offered those who wanted to go the opportunity to
do so, rather than get fired.

~~~
4ad
> Perhaps it offered those who wanted to go the opportunity to do so, rather
> than get fired.

...what? the _opportunity_?

In a normal company in most places in the developed world being laid off gives
you a severance package, while resigning usually doesn't. Not that Canonical
is a normal company by any means. The contracts are very bad, almost everyone
is some sort of contractor (not an employee); these people most likely would
not get anything anyway, just wanted to point out that resigning when you are
about to be laid off is a stupid idea.

But that is not what has happened anyway, as the article claims people were
axed, they didn't resign.

~~~
bevax
Also, Mir continues to be developed and supported.

