
Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence - popey
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/
======
gshulegaard
I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any
particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that
convergence is the future.

Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open
source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is
effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts
away from convergence and towards more traditional market segments. I mourn
the death of this innovative path.

That said, hopefully this convergence with GNOME will eventually lead back to
convergence...but for now that dream is dead it would seem.

~~~
daveguy
_data convergence_ is the future, not _interface convergence_. I think they
made a serious mistake conflating the two.

You should be able to shift your view of a document from a desktop to a
laptop, but that doesn't mean the fundamental interface from one should be
shoe-horned into the other.

That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real
estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked
vs when not docked.

~~~
8ytecoder
Agreed. I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now,
I've come to realize that the interface better be separate for different
usecases - plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work. What I
want is seamless takeover from one device to another - something like Apple's
continuity but way better. In today world this is all scattered into different
components*, the first company that does everything can lock in a huge revenue
stream.

a) Files - Dropbox b) Activity - Various browser sync for bookmarks, history
(and passwords) c) Handoff - Mac is pretty good here. Windows has no
equivalent.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now, I've come
> to realize that the interface better be separate for different usecases -
> plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how continuum works in Windows. The
interface _is_ separate when you hook up a phone into a dock (it's a desktop
interface) and the newer devices can also do it wirelessly.

Windows went with a "similar UI language" for all platforms but _still_
maintained huge differences between each platform because that made sense. It
was never the same UI.

------
s_kilk
> We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Legitimately never thought I'd ever see this. Possibly the best thing that
could happen for desktop Linux in this age.

Edit: and of course this would mean Ubuntu/Canonical and Fedora/RedHat basing
their desktop OS's on the same platform, which can only mean easier
development of desktop software and services.

~~~
NM-Super
I'm a bit torn. I like the design of Unity more than I do that of Gnome, but I
think that less fragmentation is extremely desirable.

Ultimately, I think it's a good, necessary move. Linux on the desktop will
only happen when the environment is at least as uniform as that of
Windows—from the perspective of application developers, at least.

~~~
gerbal
Canonical bending their demonstrated ui talents may just lead to a better
Gnome 3 experience.

~~~
Touche
Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good?
[http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg](http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg)

~~~
unethical_ban
That's a 6 year old screenshot. They've made incremental improvements since...
but yes, I've grown to appreciate it. The most annoying part of unity7's
interface is its alt-tab function: It toggles between apps, not windows, and
that's annoying.

~~~
xtracto
That's the same behaviour as OSX. At first I also hated this behaviour, coming
form the Linux/Window environment. But after using it in conjunction with
ALT+` (to cycle through app's Windows) I actually find it better than the
standard Windows behaviour.

~~~
pyre
My biggest issue with the macOS way is that there are edge causes when using
Spaces. The _biggest_ being "stand-alone" Chrome apps like Signal Desktop are
still tied to Chrome, even though they get their own icon and a separate place
on the Dock. CMD-Tab'ing to Signal Desktop might just send me to a Chrome
window. Ugh.

~~~
pcr0
That's why Google has been phasing out Chrome apps for a while now.

~~~
dingo_bat
Google has been phasing out chrome apps on all platforms because alt tab is
broken in osx?

------
hd4
I'm one of the people who asked for less NIH in Ubuntu in the recent thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821)
but I didn't think they would take it this far. Jokes aside, it's sad that
Unity won't be developed further.

I'm one of the ones who loves Unity 7, it's always been faster and less memory
hungry than GNOME or KDE for me. I will just have to cling onto the LTS for as
long as possible.

In the long-term I think this is good for Ubuntu and Linux users in general,
less diversity can sometimes help an ecosystem form. I think many users just
want a DE to stay out of the way and make life easier, so I hope some of the
Ubuntu ease of use focus and community will get injected back into GNOME. I
really hope a huge flood of users coming back forces them to look at their
memory usage and get it under control.

~~~
frik
Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were pretty good. Then both shells lost their way. Why do
they try to be a bad clone of macOS rather than keep being a Win98 on steriods
(KDE 3) or a more simple shell for normal users (Gnome 2).

~~~
DCKing
I dislike that people speak in such absolutes on this. You're expressing a
personal opinion.

In my opinion, Gnome 3 is amongst the best desktop shells I've ever used. It's
focus on simplicity in the base, while including extensibility using, well,
extensions is unparalleled. I like that I can choose my own complexity and
features without resorting to editing config files or hacky black magic. It's
only marred by a subjective lack of quality, quantity and consistency in
applications, as is the entire Linux/Unix desktop.

So to each their own. I also think KDE 4/5 are much nicer than KDE3.

~~~
Twirrim
For the most part I've become comfortable with the UI in Gnome 3, but I mostly
avoid it. They've done a lot to fix the initial problems that the interface
had, and I think they've got to a good place for the most part.

Try and switch to Gnome 2 / MATE for a little bit and see the drastic
improvements in responsiveness, though. That's what kills gnome 3 for me. Even
on a nice high spec machine I still end up conscious of the UI latency, and
that's really not a good position to be in. The UI needs to get out of the
way, and a key part of that is being fast.

~~~
DCKing
I agree, that's why I use the Impatience extension [1]!

I don't use anything GTK2 based any more as the lack of smooth scrolling
support is really jarring for me, despite the fact that I still like Gnome2's
basic design.

[1]:
[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/)

~~~
pcr0
I'm not sure what you were referring to with GTK2, but MATE uses GTK3 and
preserves the Gnome 2 look.

~~~
DCKing
Didn't know they migrated already, good on them!

------
ThatGeoGuy
I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately
mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this
mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore
the baseband for now)?

As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or
iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most
Canadian or USA networks, and with this announcement it seems that Ubuntu
phones won't be around for much longer. This coupled with the death of Firefox
OS means that there's really not much of a choice. Certainly you can run AOSP
with no Google Apps, but not having Google Play Services tends to cause more
and more problems, or at the very least means your phone is less and less
capable as time goes on.

I guess in general we can all celebrate that Ubuntu is moving to GNOME /
Wayland and is ditching convergence, but I think the fact that there's no
healthy alternative to iOS / Android is quite sad. If Canonical is exiting the
mobile space to work on other things, what other alternatives do users have?

~~~
ZenoArrow
I'd suggest the best remaining option for a FOSS-driven phone (now that
Canonical have dropped the ball) is Tizen. It's got the backing of a large
phone manufacturer (Samsung) and the Linux Foundation, and seems to be
actively developed. It'll probably end up being used on low-end devices at
first, but is likely to be more open than the two leading platforms, so
hopefully they get some traction amongst tech community.

It's also worth pointing out that Samsung has been investing in Servo, and
that Tizen has good support for HTML5 apps, so hopefully we can see mobile web
apps increase in popularity to get us away from the walled garden approach.

[https://www.tizen.org/](https://www.tizen.org/)

~~~
pjmlp
Tizen is a joke, they already rebooted the SDK multiple times.

1 - GTK+ based

2 - Took Bada OS C++ SDK with its Symbian C++ like flavour

3 - Rewrote the C++ API into something more appealing

4 - Thrown everything away and replaced with EFL, plain C API with C++ will
come soon

5 - Now they are adopting .NET Core with Xamarin Forms

How can anyone invest time developing for them?

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"How can anyone invest time developing for them?"

What alternative do you suggest? I suggested they were the best remaining
option for an open-source mobile OS now that Ubuntu were dropping out of the
race. What other options are there? Sailfish? Anything else?

~~~
pjmlp
There are no alternatives.

This ideology of open-source mobile OS goes back to Openmoko.

None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business."

Nokia managed it with the N900 and the N9, the only reason they didn't
continue is they lost their bottle and sold out to Microsoft.

~~~
pjmlp
If you were fine with "open source" on those Nokia devices, you should be
happy with "open source" on Android.

Also as a former employee I can tell they didn't sell that much units,
specially when compared with Symbian devices.

------
brendaningram
Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy.

I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also
think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we
have too many desktop environments, and too many distros.

If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to
Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in
the last 7 years, not just from a coding perspective, but from a community and
social perspective.

I consider it supremely important that we educate as many computer users as
possible about the negative side of proprietary software (lock in
subscriptions, proprietary file formats, closed source privacy concerns etc).

What Ubuntu did back in 2010 (I think) did major damage toward that vision.

I applaud Mark Shuttleworth for making the decision, even if he only got there
because of commercial reasons. I really hope that Canonical and Red Hat can
work together to make Gnome not just a technological success, but a social one
too.

~~~
noobermin
I'm not entirely convinced this is right. Many people worked on Gnome, I'd bet
even more did so than did for Unity and Mir. It's not that having more than
one project completely divided the FOSS community's resources up.

~~~
brendaningram
True, Gnome has had huge development carried out over the last few years. Red
Hat / Fedora have been great in terms of contributing to the FOSS community.

------
Afforess
Damn. From the horses mouth: [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/)

I might be a small minority, but I _like_ Unity 7. I have never used Unity 8,
and I thought the Ubuntu phone was misspent effort, but wow. Now I have to
figure out if there is a way to style Gnome to look like Unity 7.

I wonder what this means for Mir vs Wayland as well.

~~~
mswift42
Same here. I love the keyboard friendliness out of the box, and especially how
sparingly it uses vertical space.

I like gnome3 visually, but some design choices by the gnome team I don't
understand. While unity uses a global menu, which displays the menu items in
several columns, The gnome global menu has 1 column, with for most apps a
single entry (quit).

~~~
rvern
A blog post by Allan Day addresses the vertical space issue:
[https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-
saving-...](https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you-
space-since-2009-or-so/).

------
WD-42
Wow. This is a real shock, it wouldn't be out of place for April 1st.

This is good news for linux on the desktop. Not that diversity isn't good, but
Unity has been stale for years while Gnome has been progressing, but suffering
from the fragmentation that Canonical caused.

Hopefully this will result in more contributions upstream, which will benefit
all linux distributions. This was always the main complaint with Canonical.

------
sandGorgon
> We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

This is huge and was my #1 request for the previous post for Ubuntu 17.10.
Gnome on Fedora is amazing and I have had people walk up to me and ask me -
what OS am I running ?

It is so much better for Ubuntu and Redhat to have joint stewardship of Gnome
going forward rather than split energy on wasted competition.

My next biggest request is flatpak vs snappy - I cant believe that the package
management wars are beginning all over again in 2017. Just pick one and be
done with it. RPM and DEB will never converge, but we have a narrow window of
opportunity with flatpak and snappy.

~~~
geodel
Flatpak seems more limited in scope as documents say:

> Can Flatpak be used on servers too? Flatpak is designed to run inside a
> desktop session and relies on certain session services, such as a dbus
> session bus and a systemd --user instance. This makes Flatpak not a good
> match for a server.

Whereas Snap documents say:

Package any app for every Linux desktop, server, cloud or device, and deliver
updates directly.

~~~
sandGorgon
I know - however these things are seldom demarcated on merit and more on
ideology.

I wish the next generation of linux has a single package manager :(

~~~
geodel
I think in case of Snap, it is part of money making server business. So it is
less likely Canonical is going to give up on that.

~~~
jononor
But then you're competing with Docker images. Not that Docker is that amazing,
but I just don't see why anyone would want to use Snap instead of Docker?

~~~
mwj
Containers are for a completely different use case than system packages.

~~~
wmf
CoreOS and RancherOS have shown how everything can either be built into the
base OS image or running in Docker, with no system packages needed.

~~~
darkr
I think this had been shown somewhat before the time of these whippersnapper
distros (Slackware, LFS etc), indeed before the days of RPM, make && make
install directly on production servers were how things were done.. and it was
not good.

Also; in the case of CoreOS, the base image is still built using a package
manager (portage). Not sure about that other guy.

------
dumbmatter
This is awesome. When that "What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?" post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821)
was up recently, I wanted to say "Get rid of the abomination that is Unity"
but figured it'd just be flamebait. Little did I know how close my dreams were
to coming true!

~~~
Grue3
Gnome (for major versions > 2) is even worse than Unity though. They should've
chosen an actually usable DM like Cinnamon.

~~~
shady-lady
100% disagree. Used Mint(& Cinnamon) for years. Recently switched to Fedora
24/25 (+ Gnome).

I will never go back. Gnome is way more polished and enjoyable to use.

Actually enjoyable.

~~~
reitanqild
Will give it a try given time but I don't have high hopes for anything that
messes with menus (was enthusiastic when I got a Mac at a previous job,
positively interested in Ribbon but it turns out that for me traditional menus
still wins comfortably.)

------
moystard
It takes courage to reflect on previous decisions and re-consider your product
strategy. I am quite impressed by Mark Shuttleworth decision to move away from
Unity and the desktop/phone convergence that has been slowing down innovation
for Ubuntu, and allowed other distributions to catch up.

Every Linux users should benefit from this decision; I am excited to see the
improvements they will make to the Gnome environment.

------
paol
I'm entirely convinced that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence will happen.
It looks like an inevitability, as mobile computing power continues to grow
faster than typical consumer workloads (the same forces already made it
possible for $400 laptops to be good enough for most mainstream users).

Canonical just didn't have the resources to push a 3rd mobile platform. Hell,
even Microsoft gave up (who _did_ have the resources, and IMO made a mistake
in giving up).

~~~
therealmarv
Just my opinion: It will be Chromebook+Android or more the mixture of both.
Google is playing well by saying: "The time and technology is not yet ready
for this to happen." But I'm also convinced it will happen sooner or later.
And I'm sure Apple has some experiments in this direction... iOS and macOS are
technically more the same than Android vs. ChromeOS.

I just hope I get a good usable *nix terminal with the laptop mode ;)

------
AdmiralAsshat
GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late
([http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-
gnome-3-2...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-gnome-3-24)).
I'm still using Cinnamon, because I still like the look a bit more, but it's
getting harder to ignore all of the excellent features GNOME provides,
including: \- Drive support for file manager \- Gmail/Outlook support for
GNOME accounts and built-in calendars \- Working Wayland implementation

I'm holding out at the moment, as it's missing one feature from Cinnamon that
I really like (the ability to launch and control any audio player from the
sound icon in the tray), but when Fedora 26 launches I may finally have to
switch over.

I hope that Canonical shifting back to GNOME will further its development
under Wayland and not spend a crapload of time doing more work for Mir.

~~~
kleiba
_GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late
([http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-
gnome-3-2...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-
gnome-3-2...))._

Do you really think that? To me, this is just a collection of really old stuff
and features that should be a matter of course.

Case in point: " _the_ headline feature" (adjusting the color temperature of
your display depending on the time of day) is something that has been around
for _years_ one way or the other on all operating systems.

Or take: "Bookmarking webpages in Web now takes a single click." Hasn't that
been the case since, like, always? Even if I'm wrong, I would hardly file such
a feature under "really cool stuff".

~~~
unethical_ban
Yeah, and redshift has been available on Linux for a long time. Now it's built
in the OS.

Windows 10 doesn't have that. What's your point?

~~~
int_19h
Win10 doesn't have it out of the box, but third-party software that implements
it (like f.lux) has been available for a very long time.

(Also, FWIW, Win10 insider builds do have it out of the box.)

~~~
lvillani
Third party software has been available on Linux distributions for a long time
all the same.

Shipping this feature out of the box with an OS install started happening only
recently (e.g. Night Shift came to iOS only 1 year ago, Windows 10 is getting
it just now, AOSP has a "secret" knob to turn it on and it's enabled in 3rd
party ROMs, etc).

------
doppioandante
Unity has often been criticized because it was a Canonical thing and didn't
leverage Wayland, but it's another world compared to Gnome shell. I couldn't
like gnome shell no matter what.

I was using Gnome shell on a old eeepc. The interface is dumbed down and you
have to install a bunch of extensions to make it as functional as Unity.

What was worse is that the launcher automatically triggered the search
function, and that slowed down the pc to a crawl. I'm using KDE on it now and,
even though less stable, it has a decent interface and it is surprisingly
snappy.

~~~
jbicha
Why can't Ubuntu ship some extensions by default? After all, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux ships GNOME Classic which is GNOME Shell with some extensions
and a tweaked theme.

------
CaptSpify
I _just_ got the Ubuntu phone. It's the first smart-phone that I don't hate. I
do agree that Ubuntu needs to stop with their NIH syndrome when it comes to
desktop, but the phone market is just flat out terrible.

I would be willing to spend a lot of money for a decent FOSS phone, but there
just isn't anything out there. Ubuntu was my only hope |:(

~~~
jhasse
What about the Fairphone + AOSP + F-Droid?

~~~
CaptSpify
Have you tried using that? Android without Google play is still an exercise in
frustration. And Google is purposely designing it that way more and more as
time goes on. I don't think the Ubuntu phone is a great phone, but if I have
problems, I can usually fix them myself. Good luck doing that with any android
that I've tried on.

~~~
jhasse
> Have you tried using that?

Yes, works fine and there are a lot of awesome apps, e. g.
[https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=osm&fdid=net...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=osm&fdid=net.osmand.plus)
or
[https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=youtube&fdid...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=youtube&fdid=free.rm.skytube.oss)

> Android without Google play is still an exercise in frustration.

What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the apps
in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone.

~~~
CaptSpify
> What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the
> apps in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone.

Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android
and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything
worthwhile.

The Ubuntu phone gives me a _real_ OS that I can just "apt-get install"
something, then make a shell-script or something similar to fix my problem.
Android's shell-system is a joke, which makes sense as they don't really want
it to be usable. Ubuntu's shell system is much better, which means I can fix
the problems that I come across myself.

EDIT: I can even use my existing scripts and tools that I have for my desktop
on my ubuntu phone. It may be more accurate to say that I want a "Linux"
phone, than a "FOSS" phone, but, I'd like it to be both.

~~~
jhasse
> Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my
> android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find
> anything worthwhile.

Okay but to be fair: If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would
probably also go there a lot more often. Especially for OOTB experiences ;)

> The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install"
> something, then make a shell-script or something similar to fix my problem.
> Android's shell-system is a joke, which makes sense as they don't really
> want it to be usable. Ubuntu's shell system is much better, which means I
> can fix the problems that I come across myself.

That sounds nice indeed!

~~~
CaptSpify
> If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a
> lot more often.

Actually, I would probably not, though I can't deny I would be intrigued to
have it as an option. I am able to set up most of the things that I would want
via something like apt, or shell scripts or similar

~~~
jhasse
How would you hack a navigation app with shell scripts?

~~~
CaptSpify
I'm not sure that I would. I guess I could set up some kind of "I'm on my pc,
send this address to my phone" script, or "tell $contact when I arrive at
$location".

------
franciscop
Wow this is impressive just after the Ask HN they did few days back. It's been
few years users complaining and opposing Mir so it seems it just took that
last feedback cry. It's great that they listen to their users and also that
there's going some love given back to the desktop+server (+IoT).

Disclaimer: I am really happy using Ubuntu everyday.

~~~
sametmax
I really wonder if they events are related though. I can't imagine Shuttlework
saying "ok, those guys in HN called it", but on the other hand, the timing
given motives match so perfectly.

~~~
franciscop
I have no idea but my guess is that it's not _the reason_ , but it's the straw
that broke the camel's back (that's the saying, right?)

~~~
sametmax
I wouldn't know I'm not a native english speaker.

------
DCKing
As an end user, I like this news. Unity was never for me (I run Gnome Shell on
all my distros, including Ubuntu), I was not particularly enthused by Ubuntu
phones, and Canonical getting on track with Gnome and therefore Wayland means
we're making amazing progress to a more unified modern Linux desktop
ecosystem.

But it's also very sad. Canonical tried to bring the open source technology to
consumer devices, failed, and never really looked like succeeding in the first
place. Although they made the Linux desktop accessible to new large audiences
(including myself), they too cannot make the next step in making the
technology a real success on the general consumer market.

Ironically, their desktop popularity gave them large popularity amongst
developers and sysadmins, which now allows them to have a great business case
to sell to enterprises for cloud and IoT. The same guys that boosted the
popularity of Linux with a desktop for everyone are now going to be making
almost all their money on enterprise licenses for headless systems. Ugh.

------
shanemhansen
I can't tell you how happy I am to see convergence dying. My desktop is not
just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name
of "convergence".

WRT to unity, at least it's improved. Ubuntu w/ unity currently has the best
multi-monitor multi-dpi user experience I've seen on linux. I have a retina
laptop with 2 external displays and ubuntu unity is the only thing that just
works out of the box.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user
> interfaces in the name of "convergence".

I agree. Sadly, GNOME's huge controls also seem to be optimised for touch
screens. There are several semi-maintained hacks to reduce the padding
throughout the DE:

[https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/A...](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/AAAAAAAAEGw/AiOPnwu8KaM/s2000/gnome_3__adwaita_improved_by_half_left-d3eqzhx.png)

It's a mess. I wish GNOME just automatically looked like the bottom screenshot
when there's no touch screen connected.

~~~
Kostic
That's a realy old screenshot. GNOME 3 doesn't look like that anymore[1].

[1][https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-...](https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-screenshots.zip)

~~~
shanemhansen
Random nit: is it just me or is the font rendering pretty terrible in the
"web" screenshot?

~~~
symlinkk
Font rendering is entirely up to how you configure it. Install GNOME Tweak
Tool and go to Fonts. Keep in mind that different settings will look better on
different monitors. But try setting Hinting to Slight and Antialiasing to
RGBA. After a reboot the settings will take effect.

------
pkd
Let me say that the only thing I am sad about is Unity 8. I genuinely liked
Unity and it's easy to use, not-too-resource-hungry interface. I definitely do
not like GNOME as much. It lacks the cohesion that Unity has (I understand
why, but that doesn't negate the point).

I will be happy to see if the best parts of Unity make it back to GNOME -
GNOME just feels clunky right now. But I will continue using Ubuntu
regardless.

~~~
AndyKelley
> easy to use, not-too-resource-hungry interface.

what? unity? has it changed so much in the last 2 years that its defining
features have changed from being difficult to use, resource-hungry, to the
opposite of that?

~~~
mhall119
Unity 8 is a complete re-write based on Qt5 and Mir, it dropped dependency on
X11/Compiz and the custom Nux toolkit.

------
m45t3r
Hope just that Canonical will apply their custom theme on GNOME. As a Arch
Linux user, I think that the default GNOME theme is ugly, Unity by default
have a much better look.

~~~
pacofvf
They should use Cinnamon, or just absorb Mint, that's the most popular distro
right now anyway, and it is ubuntu-based.

~~~
WD-42
Is mint really the most popular distro? According to distrowatch, yes. But my
suspicion is that mint users just like to tell everyone they are mint users.
The majority of Ubuntu users probably just install it and go on with their
lives.

~~~
ufo
I think a big factor is that if you google for "Linux Mint" the distrowatch
page is one of the top results, while if you google for "Ubuntu Linux" you get
other results instead.

------
jimmies
I cannot wait for Unity to die, and now it does.

I was not very happy when they decided to make Unity mac-like by moving the
menu to the top bar. It has to be the most idiotic decision around for anyone
who has multiple monitors. Even with a single monitor, it is a pain in the ass
to move the mouse all the way to the top left corner for the menu to appear,
and then orienting myself with the items presented.

~~~
pkd
You could always use keyboard shortcuts to access the menu. Unity also let you
search through the menu items with the Alt key - no manual navigation
necessary.

I thought that integrated menus are a great idea - even Apple does it. It
saves vertical space and looks "at one" with the rest of the system.

~~~
vrutkovs
GNOME has solved in a radical way by simplifying menus, so you need neither
search nor frequent mouse/keyboard navigation.

Honestly 'even Apple does it' is a poor argument. If global menu would be a
really good and generally accepted idea we'd see it implemented in GNOME and
KDE (via extensions at least).

~~~
GraemeLion
[https://vizzzion.org/blog/2016/10/plasmas-road-
ahead/](https://vizzzion.org/blog/2016/10/plasmas-road-ahead/) Global Menu
being implemented in KDE 5.9.

~~~
jimmies
I don't mind the principles of it -- and I don't mind it in macOS. At least
the menu is always there, the problem with unity is that it is hidden and will
slowly appear when you hover the mouse on top. It's really hard to aim for
what I want when I actually have to access a function on the menu.

I am using KDE on anything I can, and I have no problem with them doing things
like the global menu. KDE tends to get things right to my taste.

~~~
xentronium
There is a setting for menu being always on.

------
codycraven
Super excited for this. I hate Unity's interface and was instead using Fedora
solely for that reason. About 5 months ago I switched to Ubuntu GNOME and have
been loving the stability of Ubuntu with the advanced interface of GNOME.

------
shmerl
Dropping Unity means dropping Mir, which is a good thing. Now developers can
avoid redundant efforts, and can focus on Wayland. And it's still a huge pile
of work for many complex applications like Firefox, Wine and many others,
including graphics drivers, GUI toolkits, libraries like SDL and etc.

------
anilgulecha
Wow.. I see where Mr. Shuttleworth is coming from.

I'd like to state that I'm a happy Ubuntu user, and have been using Unity for
the past few years and have generally found it to be a good ui for the
desktop. I know many many others fall in the same bucket.

------
i80and
Page isn't loading, but that's a pity if true :(

I ended up dropping desktop Linux entirely last year, but Unity was the only
thing that I thought wasn't matched by any other desktop operating system.

------
oldgun
Not really a Unity fan or a 'Convergence' fan, but just saddened by the fact
so many developers and community enthusiasts get to know that their efforts
were in vain.

------
karussell
Honest question: how is Canonical making money in the cloud with ubuntu?

Everytime someone installs an image with 'Ubuntu' in the name the cloud
provider has to pay Canonical? Or what else could be the main revenue stream
'in the cloud'?

~~~
Elhana
Short answer: Enterprise bosses like support contracts, because it covers
their asses. You can basically ask the same question about redhat.

~~~
karussell
I can imagine this now, but how did they get to this point? I mean RedHat was
a small unknown company then probably no one would have bought a support
contract from them or at least the prices of these contracts were tiny.

~~~
akulbe
I pay for a RH support contract... and it's a ripoff, if you ask me. Unless
you're a MASSIVE company spending MASSIVE dollars... response time is slow.
The turnaround time for a simple issue was like one question and one answer
every 24 hours. It took me almost a week to get a simple registration issue
worked out.

The #rhel channel on FreeNode was _WAY_ more helpful in terms of skill and
response time, and that was free. :/

I _want_ to pay, to support them, but I'd like it to be worth it. Currently,
it's hard to see where it is.

------
uam
Does this mean that Ubuntu is moving away from Mir, to Wayland?

~~~
mhall119
Ubuntu will use what upstream GNOME uses, which means Wayland for the
compositor.

------
dhruvmittal
Hopefully now we can all agree on Wayland and start moving a little faster
towards {application,driver,etc} support and capabilities.

I feel like Ubuntu's Mir pushing was one of the big things holding back
Wayland from widespread support and adoption.

I'd love to dump X without feeling like I'm shooting myself in the foot
sometime in the next few years.

------
dflock
Excellent news! I personally think unity is terrible - and it's objectively
lacking in several areas, multi-monitor support particularly.

The Ubuntu phone thing was a nice idea, but obviously never going to fly, so
it's nice to see canonical putting their efforts where their actual users are.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>" it's objectively lacking in several areas, multi-monitor support
particularly."

Interesting, considering...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043855)

Are you basing your views of Unity on recent experience?

~~~
dflock
Wan't thinking about multi-resolution or HiDPI - or other technical 'support'
\- but actual ergonomic use of multiple-monitors. It's lack of customisability
in the placement of things, as well as the anachronistic global menu bar, mean
that using it with, say, 3 large monitors of pretty sub-par.

------
pluma
Unity has grown on me over the years but I guess I will adapt. I'm not
interested in having strong opinions about my OS's UI anymore so I just hope
they'll stick with whatever they switch to.

------
0xFFC
I knew this was happening. They invested on Unity8 in quite reverse way. They
had opportunity to make unity8 excellent desktop environment (they had money
and workforce) and after becoming most popular de in linux environment they
could continue that to mobile space(they are most popular linux distro
already). Putting money on phone portion instead of desktop portion of the
unity8 was biggest mistake i cna imagine. I can't understand rational behind
it. Just look at what Microsoft does, they prioritize desktop win10 over
mobile win10.

~~~
GraemeLion
The only thing I can guess is they thought that to succeed in convergence,
they would have to win the phone market, and that was the harder market to
design for and react to. So, they built for that and tried to win the hardware
developers/companies.

I suspect they thought if they got that, they could converge things back on
the desktop

~~~
skierpage
That's exactly what Unity 8 in Ubuntu release N.NN was going to do. The
converged apps, the latest version of Unity, the new Mir display server, all
running on the desktop as well as the Ubuntu Phone builds. The problem was,
N.NN kept shifting from 14.04 to 16.04 to 17.04, and now never.00

With each Ubuntu release Canonical made fewer changes to Unity 7 on the
desktop (the one I remember is moving from a global menu to a menu in a
program's title bar), because the new awesome was around the corner...

------
tatsuhirosatou
I am quite happy to see this. Although I am saddened by the death of the
Ubuntu phone, this means that GNOME will get a lot more development and will
receive the love and care of Canonical's excellent design teams. Gnome 3 is
already shaping up to be quite a marvel, I am very excited about what will
come next.

Furthermore, even if the dream of a free as in freedom Linux phone is pushed
down a bit down the future, I think that a joint community/Canonical/Red Hat
effort will eventually materialize.

P.S. I hope for a return to the brown and orange theme too!

------
pjmlp
I like GNOME, but actually was quite comfortable with Unity.

While I do understand their change of focus, after all someone needs to pay
those developers somehow, and resources are limited, it kind of reminds me
about Red-Hat's decision that enterprise was where money is, as they switched
their focus away from desktop.

Cloud and IoT are basically where enterprise is going and where GNU/Linux is
just part of the underlying services, but not the main product being sold.

------
tradesmanhelix
"Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence"

Translation: "We don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop
because it's not making us much $$$."

Dear Canonical,

Your actions are a huge let down to the community. You caused a lot of strife
with the move away from Gnome to Unity in 2010, and now you're ripping the rug
out from under even more users after feeding us crap about convergence, etc.
for the past 4-5 years (?). Nobody _asked_ you to do any of that phone or
convergence stuff, but peddling it like it's the next big thing and then
pulling it without ever even really shipping a working product is just
amateurish and make the whole FOSS community look bad.

You and FOSS companies like you - please stop. Next time you have an idea
that's going to be the next "big thing" or a "world-changing paradigm shift",
ship something _before_ you start hyping it to the tech press. Ubuntu
Touch/Unity 8 is just the latest in a long line of embarrassing open-source
let downs that took enormous amounts of time and energy away from the
community with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Signed,

 _A disappointed ex-Ubuntu user_

~~~
kleiba
1\. You say that Canonical's move from Gnome to Unity in 2010 caused a lot of
strife. 2\. Now they're undoing that step.

Shouldn't you be happy rather than disappointed?

~~~
tradesmanhelix
Yeah, I can understand how that's confusing. I meant to convey two things:

1\. I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy,
and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they
should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place.

2\. In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use
Unity and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the
rug out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a
horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing.

This behavior reminds me of MS forcing Metro UI on people in Windows 8 for
years and then (mostly) abandoning it without ceremony in Win 10. I don't
expect MS to care about anything other than the bottom line, but I had hoped
for more from Canonical.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy,
and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they
should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place."

So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should
continue on making that same mistake regardless?

>"In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use Unity
and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the rug
out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a
horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing."

If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led
project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.

~~~
tradesmanhelix
> So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should
> continue on making that same mistake regardless?

Doesn't sound to me like Canonical is admitting a mistake. Quote from OP:

"This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of
my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the
people and _the product, both of which are amazing_." (emphasis added)

My point is that Canonical's behavior, both in 2010 and now, is bad corporate
citizenship. They're showing very little regard for their users and their
community.

> If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led
> project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.

Honestly, I hope that doesn't happen. If convergence and Ubuntu Phone aren't
happening, I'd rather see the resources go into other DEs that already have a
strong community like KDE, GNOME, or MATE.

------
mtalantikite
For their embedded device support I'd like to see them go even smaller than
what they list on their Core (IoT) devices page. Sure, Raspberry Pi is nice
and all, but I wouldn't build an embedded system around it.

Lately I've been hacking some projects on the Arduino Industrial 101, which
has a small Atheros AR9331 MIPS based SoC, but it ships with a very old
OpenWRT that doesn't seem to get much in terms of updates. I spent time
building a new image for it based off of the LEDE fork that is being brought
back into OpenWRT, then wrestled with various parts of the Linux side of the
board, but ultimately I really don't want to be managing build pipelines for
Linux system updates. At this point I may just wait for AVR changes to Rust to
land and ditch the Linux side all together.

That's all to say, it really would be nice to have a small footprint embedded
Linux distribution that wasn't mainly focused on routers like OpenWRT (not a
knock on OpenWRT). Raspberry Pi and Samsung Artik 10 aren't really something
I'd completely consider as embedded systems (also not a knock on either of
those boards).

~~~
nisa
The problem is that all these routers and a lot of the embedded stuff don't
get updates due to shitty vendor drivers for a lot of components. Most of the
work on LEDE/OpenWRT is from volunteers that just want to make it work. Usally
these devices/boards ship with an SDK from the manufacturer that is often
based on OpenWRT but has some hard dependency on an ancient kernel, non-GPL
sources or messy GPL drivers that need a lot of work until they can be
upstreamed to the kernel.

That beeing said, LEDE is not only for routers - I think the ubus/procd/netifd
system is pretty great - there is uhttpd-mod-ubus that allows you to configure
everything via json-rpc (also websocket support is coming)

Maybe the tradeoffs from LEDE to run with fine with a current kernel/userland
on 32mb (or even 16mb ram) / 4mb flash devices might make it more complicated
to use it as general purpose system.

------
butz
Ditching Unity for Gnome - good news. Dropping Ubuntu Phone - not. First
Firefox OS, now Ubuntu Phone. I suppose it shouldn't be that hard to create a
fully open source mobile OS, with possible "convergence" functionality
(running desktop apps when device is connected to big screen)? Especially now,
when all apps are going to web a. k. a. Progressive Web Apps.

~~~
int_19h
It might not be that hard to create the OS. But it is pretty hard to find
operators willing to preinstall it on phones, which is what you need to have
any sort of marketshare for it.

~~~
petecox
Monetization was Canonical and Mozilla's first mistake. A grass-roots movement
would stand a better chance through embracing the custom ROM community.

The way forward would be to fork lineage os as a base, make it dead trivial to
port any device that has a pre-existing 14.1 nightly build, then set up build
slaves for the community to test with.

------
mikescandy
This looks like the same shift that has been happening in Microsoft for the
past few years. They tried phone convergence (continuum, the one core across
devices), but the real focus is now cloud and services. Also, the fact that
Microsoft ships Ubuntu as the Linux on Windows subsystem definitely shows an
alignment on the companies' plans.

------
mhsabbagh
Funny that it came after 24 hours of my article about those stuff in Ubuntu:
[https://fosspost.org/2017/04/03/ubuntu-needs-consider-
remain...](https://fosspost.org/2017/04/03/ubuntu-needs-consider-remain-
remarkable/)

3 of them are now true. Karma.

------
nnain
I like the pragmatism in this letter: "What the Unity8 team has delivered so
far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community,
ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."

Ubuntu has done well in growing the Linux community. I hope they continue
interesting work in the future.

------
khc
Does that mean existing resources that Canonical is putting in Unity will be
diverted to GNOME?

~~~
WD-42
Hopefully. The folks on irc.gnome.org seem pretty excited by the news.

------
abrowne
I've mostly been using the excellent Ubuntu MATE lately, but of the "modern"
desktops I've always preferred GNOME to Unity, despite the latter having some
good ideas. Ubuntu GNOME exists, but it'll be better with official support.

------
reality_czech
Hooray, Unity and Mir are dead!

Now the next step is to give people a good migration path to Fedora or Debian.

------
cbhl
I think this is the right decision for Ubuntu.

I _also_ think that convergence is the future, but I don't think the market is
ready for it. Phones run on ARM, desktops run on x86. The non-Pro Microsoft
Surface is good, but many people still have a few x86-only legacy applications
or devices that need a "real computer". USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 adoption is just
barely in its infancy, and it'll be a couple of years before we start seeing
it on affordable mass-market phones, laptops, printers, monitors, and so
forth.

I think we've got another decade or so to go, but the pieces are slowly moving
into place. Unity was a bit too far ahead of its time.

------
klndsklnds
But atleast they made one product from ubuntu mobile: snap (ubunto core)

------
sambe
Damn. Just been forced to switch to Mate at work and find it like living in
the past. Lots of defaults seem ugly or unusable (hunting through menus for
programs etc.).

~~~
jhasse
GNOME 3 and MATE don't have much in common though.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Apart from GTK3.

~~~
jhasse
Only until recently.

------
nik736
I am simply hoping Apple is working on parts of Shuttleworths' vision where
your iPhone becomes your daily driver. Just plug it in to your Display and
have a fully fledged iOS/macOS hybrid version to work with.

Xiaomi is releasing the Mi6 in some weeks with 8 GB of RAM, so it's only a
matter of time until we get comparable specs like we have in MacBooks or even
Desktops in the smartphone form factor (which will be incredible in itself).

------
unlmtd
I actually knew Unity/mir was doomed over 2 years ago. I can also say aptitude
is doomed. Nix or a derivative renders imperative system management obsolete.

------
afandian
As someone who bought an Ubuntu Tablet in good faith, and received OK hardware
but an OS that was profoundly un-production-ready, I wonder where this leaves
me. There's no explicit mention of what's going to happen to people running
Ubuntu Tablet who paid for a device.

Maybe I'll get what I always wanted, which is a traditional desktop OS tweaked
for tablet usability. Maybe I'll just get nothing.

------
vbezhenar
Last Ubuntu I enjoyed was 10.04. They switched to Unity and I didn't use
Ubuntu since, I liked old Gnome and switched mostly to CentOS. For me it was
like Windows 8 — may be it's good, but it looks completely different so I
don't want to deal with it. Now Microsoft returned good old windows with
Windows 10, Ubuntu returning to Gnome and Apple's not abandoning macOS. Good
times.

------
dleslie
I wanted an Ubuntu phone but was waiting for some kind of official store to
buy them from, and not flash a phone myself or buy a developer device.

------
avodonosov
I'm not a fan of Unity as a desktop environment, but it's sad to hear about
phone - I hoped to have a phone with normal, familiar OS.

------
bitL
My translation: Ubuntu is running out of money, maybe already feeling the heat
from the decision to provide Linux subsystem in W10, disincentivizing
developers from switching to stand-alone Ubuntu, therefore they need to cut
things not projecting bringing profit soon.

------
BudFox
The problem was not the vision or community rejection as Mark suggests. It was
a failure of mindshare with unpalatable Canonical licensing and suboptimal
engagement. These issues are surmountable, but only if Mark / Canonical look
within first.

------
wassimsab
The one thing I'd miss from unity is HUD. Too bad canonical didn't focus on
it.

------
juskrey
Gnome was getting better without Canonical exactly because nobody was trying
to "converge" it - linux ecosystem gains from randomness and branching. Now
new centralized efforts to "canonicalize" will dumb it down again.

------
awinter-py
All I need graphics for is the web.

Build a terminal-only window manager with firefox built in.

~~~
pythonaut_16
Does a tiling window manager like i3 not fit that use case?

~~~
gremlinsinc
i LOVE i3. Just gotta say best thing ever for my workflow.

------
LeicaLatte
Going all in on their strengths and moving away from fluff like 'convergence'
is the right thing to do for any company. Happy that Canonical's focus is back
on the server.

------
frik
Let's keep Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) an individual company. One of
the worst case scenarios is that a big company buys Canonical and f*cks with
Ubuntu.

------
BudFox
The problem was not the vision or community rejection as Mark suggests. It was
a failure of mindshare with unpalatable Canonical licensing and suboptimal
engagement.

------
reitanqild
Yes! Yes yes yes!

IMO possibly what I think of as the lost years of Ubuntu are over.

I tried a few times but concluded that they had decided to go in a direction
where I didn't want to go.

------
nnutter
Canonical ”raised" like 20 million USD to create a converged phone but the
"community/market didn't want it"?

~~~
joshlemer
That was $12 million, and that was in 2013, and if I understand correctly how
indiegogo works, they didn't get to claim any of that money because they
didn't reach their goal of $30 million

------
hitlin37
this was expected. Unity 8 has been getting pushed farther and farther and it
seemed very unfinished in previews.

------
Apocryphon
Firefox OS also (briefly) pivoted to IoT after their mobile efforts failed. Is
this a natural pattern?

------
Grazester
I am happy about this. I hated Unity

------
AsyncAwait
Looks like they saw that RH recently hit $2bn in subscription revenue and
went...damn son :-)

------
severino
Unfortunately, I guess Ubuntu Desktop won't last much, too. Can Canonical make
money from that? Nope. They even made their product less appealing when they
helped Microsoft run it inside their OS.

I always thought Canonical wouldn't be around much longer, and these news
seems to confirm that. I'd, as a long time Ubuntu user, miss them.

~~~
m45t3r
The great advantage that Ubuntu have by being the most popular Desktop distro
is not making money from desktop users. The advantage is that some of those
desktop users are also developers, so when they need to deploy their system in
Server/Cloud/IoT/whatever, they choose Ubuntu because this is the distro that
they developed their application to begin with.

So yeah, desktop is a afterthought for Canonical, however it is still
important.

~~~
severino
Yes but, can Canonical make a business out of that? They get no (significant)
money either from people using their system in embedded platforms or cloud
servers.

------
skdotdan
Am I the only one who doesn't like this news?

I shared the Shuttleworth's view on convergence.

------
nol13
Sorry for being Unity h8ter :/

I mean I appreciate what you all were doing, but ya, I like MATE.

------
nicolaslekai
This could mean a significant jump in the adoption of Debian, from Ubuntu
users!

------
hackuser
Could it be forked? Is there a community that would continue to develop Unity?

~~~
pawadu
_This is a fork of canonical 's unity 8 repository as of April 5, 2017.
Following Mark Shuttleworth's announcement to abandon unity 8 development, we
are planning to continue working with the project._

[https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org](https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org)

------
chrisper
What about snap? Are they going to switch to flatpak as well?

------
simlevesque
Today was a good day.

------
hitlin37
Do one thing (Desktop) and do it well.

------
signa11
any specific reason why desktop linux seems to be converging on gtk instead of
qt ?

~~~
int_19h
I think it's a combination of largely unrelated historical trends (dating to
way back, when Qt was GPL-only, and even before that, when it had its own
incompatible license).

That said, it's interesting that most commercial desktop software for Linux
these days seems to be written in Qt, not Gtk. Also, while this is anecdotal,
most _new_ projects (as in, started recently, as opposed to old software
having new releases) seem to be trending Qt in my experience. So there's a
weird divergence here between the DE and the apps.

~~~
pksadiq
> I think it's a combination of largely unrelated historical trends ...

Some of the facts are still true. Say for example, Qt is now licensed under
LGPLv3, which several corporate hate. GTK+ is licensed under LGPLv2.1+.

~~~
pawadu
How is LGPLv3 different from the usual binary only libraries the corporate
buy??

Also, there is a paid Qt license if you don't like *GPL.

------
gigatexal
Time to switch back to Ubuntu

------
clircle
I am so happy

------
winteriscoming
This is going to be interesting. The whole reason I moved away from Ubuntu,
which was my goto linux distribution, around a decade ago was because they
moved to Unity. I switched to Linuxmint and have been on it ever since.

Now that Ubuntu is going back to Gnome, although I may not switch back to it
immediately, it will at least be in my mind as an option whenever I keep
upgrading Linuxmint.

------
pmoriarty
Now if they could just abandon systemd.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Gnome 3 and systemd are closely intertwined. Running Gnome without it would be
a lot of work.

~~~
goalieca
The death of unix right there

~~~
davexunit
UNIX was never very good, though. Even at its inception it was a stripped down
OS for the PDP-11 because they could not run Multics. C was a stripped down
version of BCPL that didn't even have floating point numbers. Looking to the
"UNIX way" as the gold standard sets the bar very low.

------
frik
How much has another company paid, that Ubuntu dropped it?

------
Grue3
Growing Ubuntu for [current buzzword] rather than [last year's buzzword].

Why not just build it for server and desktop because that's what Ubuntu is
best at, and not chase the latest fads?

~~~
cwyers
> Why not just build it for server

What do you think Cloud means?

~~~
majewsky
Exactly. In this context, "cloud" is just the buzzword du jour that makes
pointy-haired bosses throw money at IT infrastructure.

------
ldev
Not really news, saying "linux distro chases ideas to rewrite instead of
sticking to one thing and fixing it and that's why linux desktop won't ever
happen" is like saying "grass is green".

------
mtgx
Does that mean they're going to make it easy _not_ to have the taskbar on the
side - or god forbid, even put it at the bottom _by default_? I remember that
"convergence" with mobile was the primary reason why the Ubuntu UI was
designed the way it was and why the taskbar was put on the side.

Yes, I realize a lot of Ubuntu users have already gotten used to it, and some
may even prefer it, but I'm sure the majority of new users would feel confused
and turned off by it. I would argue Ubuntu has to focus more on gaining
Windows users than on keeping the hardcore Linux users.

~~~
WD-42
Have you ever used Gnome? There is no taskbar :)

~~~
Scarblac
To me as a Firefox-and-terminals user, the main difference between the two is
that Unity has a fugly taskbar always on the left of my screen where I don't
want it, and windows have their menu somewhere unrelated to the window (at the
top of the screen). If Gnome doesn't have either, great!

~~~
tribaal
You can auto-hide the taskbar, and switch to "menus in the windows" in the
settings (I mean the UI, not some obscure terminal thing).

My mother in law managed to find that option on her own, I'm sure you can as
well :)

------
tofflos
Sad to see this. But also glad to see a less fragmented Linux desktop. I've
always stuck with Gnome but the video in Mark's announcement looks pretty
good. I guess it's true what they say - A system is never a popular as the day
it is decommissioned.

I hope they can also align their release schedule with the Gnome team. I want
to be on the latest desktop and get access to all the new features as they
come out - not six months later.

