
Ubuntu 18.04 with Unity8 - reddotX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KnfxXWHtY
======
kev009
Ubuntu has always confused me. It seemed like such an obvious gag from the
very beginning, a theme job on Debian unstable without much engineering teeth.
But people went crazy for it. The resources would have been better spent
working directly with and on Debian, and offering
support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem
seriously dubious to me (although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't
really done anything egregious as I feared initially). It's water under the
bridge now and the two have learned to coexist, but I think the future of
Debian is unquestionable while Ubuntu has a SPOF in Canonical. I heard a rumor
that Shuttleworth is trying to sell Canonical right now. He approached Red Hat
and they weren't interested. I can't substantiate that, just hearsay.

~~~
ChrisSD
I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside
investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing.
That's why Unity was dropped.

As to you other point, their goal was to make a Linux distro that was easy to
install, setup and use for the ordinary person (or ordinary geek at least).
They might have lost their way a bit in recent years but they were initially
remarkably successful. Sure others had tried to do the same before them but
for its time Ubuntu was by far the best of them.

That's more arguable nowadays but that doesn't undermine what they achieved.

~~~
lawl
Yup, things were different 10 years ago and Ubuntu really made a lot of things
easier. Back then getting 3D acceleration to work was a real nightmare (for a
linux newbie like me) at the time. Or WiFi drivers. Or getting your system to
play videos, because you didn't have the correct gstreamer-* packages.

10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty
much all hardware, but back then Ubuntu was definitely ahead of the pack in
these regards.

~~~
veidr
> _10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty
> much all hardware_

I do appreciate the strides Linux has made since a decade ago, but I still
think that's crazy talk. I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out
of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten
years.

I mean if "works" is defined to mean something equivalent to what macOS or
Windows do. Wi-Fi, webcam, bluetooth, graphics acceleration, highres screen,
sound, fingerprint reader, keyboard backlight, hardware volume/brightness
controls, multitouch trackpad... at least _some_ of those things are _always_
broken on any mainstream distro I've tried, including Ubuntu.

Doesn't mean Linux isn't awesome, but saying it works out of the box on almost
all hardware is a pretty radical downward redefinition of "works".

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and
> I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years.

I've recently bought a HP ProBook (a xx75 model) for dual booting of Linux and
Windows 7. Imagine my surprise when in Linux everything was working out of the
box, whereas in Windows I had to actually use another laptop first in order to
load WiFi drivers. Even USB 3.0 ports didn't work under Windows out of the
box.

~~~
rbanffy
To say nothing about the nightmare it is to find out what is actually broken
in Windows. Should you use the Control Panel wireless applet or the vendor
supplied GUI app with non-standard UI?

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butz
Looks like this post is giving impression that Ubuntu 18.04 will use Unity,
but that's not true. Official Ubuntu will be still using Gnome desktop
environment. In this video some guy is running Unity 8 on Ubuntu 18.04, to
show it's possible.

~~~
squeezingswirls
Yep this is mainly part of UBports project.

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kleiba
Wasn't Canonical going to drop Unity?

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/04/ubunt...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-desktop-will-switch-back-to-gnome-
next-year/)

~~~
desdiv
The video description links to this repo:
[https://github.com/ubports/unity8-desktop-install-
tools](https://github.com/ubports/unity8-desktop-install-tools)

which basically does "apt install unity8-desktop-session". So the default
desktop environment is GNOME, and this is just showing off Unity 8 as an
alternative.

~~~
squeezingswirls
Is not just showing off Unity 8 as an alternative, this is part of a community
effort to port Ubuntu to mobile devices.

See ubports.com

~~~
kleiba
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

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FridgeSeal
Looks good!

Given this is unity and not Gnome, does this mean that typing in a file
explorer window will select matching files folders in the current directory?
(Forward search I think it's called?)

Because currently, Gnome in 17.10 performs recursive search and it's terribly
annoying and unhelpful and there doesn't appear to be any way to change it.

~~~
Freak_NL
That would be a feature in Nautilus, Gnome's file explorer. Unity uses/used it
as well, so I would expect it to behave in the same way unless patched or
reconfigured (if that is at all possible).

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bubblethink
I really wish that at least unity 7 is an official/semi-official flavour for
18.04. I'm perfectly happy with my workflow on 16.04, and have no desire to
switch to Gnome, Plasma or anything else. None of the other alternatives come
close enough to the simplicity, intuitiveness and stability of unity 7 at the
moment. This is of course subjective, but without unity, I see very little
reason to use Ubuntu over other distros.

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JetSpiegel
I thought Unity was abandoned? Isn't the default Gnome 3 now?

~~~
squeezingswirls
Yep this is mainly part of a community project called UBports.

