
Ubuntu Unity is dead: Desktop will switch back to GNOME next year - symfoniq
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-desktop-will-switch-back-to-gnome-next-year/
======
gshulegaard
Source article discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631)

This is the second duplicate I have seen today on HN.

~~~
dang
What's the other one?

~~~
gshulegaard
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043860)

------
awfgylbcxhrey
_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.

~~~
yoavm
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.

~~~
cmurf
Google Fuschia?

------
Andrex
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.)

~~~
smoyer
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!

~~~
Omnius
What other lighter solutions are you using?

~~~
smoyer
I've got XFCE installed but I'm working on learning RatPoison (a tiling window
manager that doesn't use the mouse). It's a bit of a learning curve, so
depending on what I'm working on, I switch between them (for now).

It's also a bit more of a pain to run multiple monitors with RatPoison and
I've become well acquainted with reorganizing my screen configurations using
the console commands to xrandr.

I also should have noted that I switched back to Xubuntu from Linux Mint.

------
clock_tower
8-10 years from now, I expect we'll see:

"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
Cloud may be a fad, but Ubuntu is making a lot of money on it. Mobile may not
have been a fad, but Ubuntu was losing a lot of money on it.

~~~
slitaz
Android is killing it and there is no viable open alternative.

~~~
camus2
> Android is killing it and there is no viable open alternative.

Because of all the services Google provide on top of it. That's where the real
value is, just like iOS, CyanogenMOD and co don't seem that popular. If
Microsoft wants to make a come-back in the mobile space, that's where it needs
to focus.

------
alkonaut
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...).

~~~
abritinthebay
Sadly, this appears to be because _that stuff is hard_ and most hackers on
Linux just don't care about it.

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.

------
throw2016
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.

[1] [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/)

~~~
smitherfield
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.

~~~
throw2016
Systemd was a highly controversial project and was attacked for a lot of
technical and complexity reasons, not NIH. Btrfs origin is an Oracle project.

We are taking about a section of the community who carry the flag for Redhat
and dismiss anything not from that ecosystem as NIH.

A typical example to show this is Snappy which precedes Flatpak. No one
attacks Flatpak for NIH or demands they join hands with Ubuntu Snappy. Yet
Snappy is routinely attacked as NIH and presented as another example of Ubuntu
doing its own thing. There is definitely double standards and politics at play
here.

------
mixedCase
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.

~~~
Andrex
I believe Gnome strongly encourages apps to be written in Vala (C#-alike with
C support) now. [1]

The built-in official Gnome programming IDE ("Builder") seems to support "C,
C++, Python, Vala, Rust and Ctags" too. [2]

Edit- A complete list of fully- and partially-supported languages for Gtk+ 3
is here: [https://www.gtk.org/language-
bindings.php](https://www.gtk.org/language-bindings.php)

Edit 2- I was wrong about Vala! See comments below. :)

1\.
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala](https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala)
2\. [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder)

~~~
jgillich
Actually, quite the opposite, the GNOME folks have been moving away from it:
[https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-
vala/](https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-vala/)

I think the only Vala maintainer right now is from Elementary OS, where they
use primarily Vala.

~~~
Andrex
Interesting. Thanks for the link!

------
3princip
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.

~~~
phkahler
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 ;-)

~~~
simion314
If that would be possible we would not have MATE or people/projects droping
GTK for Qt, Gnome has a vision and it will follow it, and a big chunk of
people like it for some reason.

------
slitaz
[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/)

Source link.

~~~
bingo_cannon
Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-
ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-
convergence/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
waingake
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.

~~~
kasabali
You can use XFCE or MATE with the "topmenu" plugin.

~~~
bwat49
I believe KDE can do this now as well

------
AnonymousPlanet
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.

------
wallacoloo
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.

~~~
tracker1
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.

------
temp
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.

------
bufordsharkley
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.

~~~
marten-de-vries
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.

------
rbanffy
Unity had one thing going for it - it was compact. Gnome wastes a ton of
vertical space on crappy 768x1366 displays.

Apart from that, Gnome is _very_ polished these days.

------
swhalen
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.

------
partycoder
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.

------
ernst_klim
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.

------
bigpeopleareold
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... :))

~~~
rch
> 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."

~~~
phkahler
This is the one part of the announcement that is a clear benefit. MIR has
always been unique to Ubuntu and a waste of effort. If they put even half of
the resources behind Wayland and Gnome, the remaining issues with them should
get resolved quickly.

------
duiker101
Never liked Unity. It just didn't feel right, I wouldn't even know what. But I
recently tried KDE Plasma and wow that's a really nice one!

~~~
rocky1138
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.

~~~
duiker101
I am actually running Kubuntu, guess I need to give Neon a try. The only
reason I went for Ubuntu was for the drivers of the video and the headset.

------
yamaneko
That will be great for Gnome3 extensions too. Although they are great and
there are some very useful ones, I have this feeling that a few of them look a
bit abandoned. There's much potential there to be explored.

By the way, I miss a few functionalities from Gnome2 in Gnome3. These
extensions make it complete for me.

\- [AlternateTab][1]. I can't get used to grouping windows by application. It
requires one extra step to get to a target window. I think workspaces do a
better job for organizing windows.

\- [WorkspaceGrid][2]. I like this way workspaces are organized better than a
single line. Makes them more accessible in a 4x4 setup.

\- [TaskBar][3]. I miss the task bar from Gnome2. I still use 'Activities',
but it requires one extra step to get to a window. It's great for having an
overview of your applications, though. I enable a single taskbar at the top.

\- [PixelSaver][4]. Remove the title bar and blends the close button with the
task bar. Saves a few pixels when the window is maximized.

[1]:
[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/)

[2]: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/484/workspace-
grid/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/484/workspace-grid/)

[3]:
[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/584/taskbar/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/584/taskbar/)

[4]: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-
saver/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/)

------
tmaly
I wish they did not make the jump to systemd so fast on LTS. I had to rewrite
everything on a recent upgrade.

~~~
mattbillenstein
I've been running everything using supervisord lately -- then I only need to
maintain a single system startup script. And I can use supervisord under OSX
easily as well to run the same stack of stuff.

~~~
thearn4
I use supervisord a lot as well, though I actually had issues getting it up
and running on the latest Ubuntu. It seems that it isn't enabled immediately
after installation via apt-get, but has to be manually enabled. Minor hiccup,
but a small pain.

edit: specifically, I think this was my issue:
[https://github.com/Supervisor/supervisor/issues/735](https://github.com/Supervisor/supervisor/issues/735)

which seems to be patched now.

------
Pica_soO
I disliked Unity. But overall its a loss. Its back to wandering the Desktop-
desert again, always traversing from one "soon-to-be-good" Desktop to the
next, none of them willing, to force the underlying applications to respect
the users work, aka as storing once made decisions and sharing them between
applications. I know, Unity didn't provide that either - but it was the one
chance to move into the right direction on all devices.

------
feelandcoffee
This can be good. In paper less fragmentation means bug correction,
performance optimization, and others it's centralized with more resources and
bigger communities. Who knows maybe this was the thing for Wayland to get out
of the always-kinda-beta field.

I know there are some people who love Unity, and I hope for them a fork
community-developed to emerge. It's sad when your software you use daily it's
victim of something like this

~~~
simion314
Competition is always good, we noticed some non canonical projects getting
speed when Canonical launched alternatives.

------
pc2g4d
Never liked and never used Unity, but defaulting to GNOME 3 is also
unattractive to me. MATE or Cinnamon would be more welcome.

~~~
cJ0th
Completely agree. Gnome 3 is pretty but annoying. Fortunately there is Lubuntu
if you fancy a lighter, more functional DE.

------
mirekrusin
"Desktop will switch back to GNOME next year" \- year of the Linux desktop is
next year then - sounds about right.

------
homulilly
Never been a fan of Unity, glad they're dumping it and finally going back to
something that works.

------
bdwalter
Hallelujah!!!

~~~
shock
Was anyone forcing you to use Unity against your wishes? Why are you glad I
have one less option? In fact it was my daily driver for quite a while, I'm
pretty sad about the news.

~~~
pbreit
Diffusing resources. In this case one good option might be better than 2
mediocre options.

~~~
shock
It doesn't automatically follow that all the developers that were working on
Unity will now be working on Gnome.

~~~
cat199
Am not OP, but this is more than unity v gnome -

it is wayland vs mir, which had the potential to much more radically fragment
linux GUI applications over the long run..

------
Jerry2
What's the point of using Ubuntu now? Fedora will look the same and will be
better.

~~~
Watabou
Ubuntu being debian based is a huge reason for me. Apt is both more familiar
and easier to use than yum/dnf, at least for me, but I'm sure for many others
as well since most of the time, the first distro they try out _is_ some form
of Ubuntu.

~~~
jgillich
I read this so often, but I have no idea why people think that.

* dnf's basic commands are all obvious: install, search, update and info - unlike the seperation between apt-get and apt-cache

* dnf automatically fetches and updates the repo cache

* dnf can rollback entire transactins

* dnf supports delta-upgrades, which speed up things a lot on slower connections

* dnf makes unattended upgrades easy (just add -y), apt may still ask questions even with DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

The new apt tool improves on some of these issues, but dnf is still a much
better tool in my opinion.

~~~
toyg
Dnf? Oh, so they replaced yum? Which in turn replaced whatever it was RH used
before...

In the meantime, apt-get has been there (and "good enough") from before yum
even existed. I really don't like re-learning for the sake of it; the less I
need to know to run a box, the better.

------
cosinetau
THANK FUCK!

~~~
JupiterMoon
I also sighed with relief. Generally this is what happens with Linux desktop
through several technologies compete and one comes through after a while as
the winner. Now that Wayland is actually shipping and with the whole community
shortly behind it I hope to see some nice improvements in the Linux desktop in
the next few years.

If someone could fix Network Manager that would be nice though...

~~~
cosinetau
Seriously. When they announced Unity, the only thing I could think of was "too
many cooks in the kitchen." I have no trouble with choice, but too many
options is devastatingly fragmenting. The investment should have gone with
Gnome to begin with, as Ubuntu had already made the commitment to that
project.

------
TurboHaskal
I no longer care. I'm having a blast with the user land under WSL.

~~~
dhimes
Gotta admit- it's really cool. But I still more often than not fire up a linux
under virtualbox on my windows box. I'm actually pretty delighted at how well
vb works.

------
return0
And if they are looking for a new fad, please let it be a natural language
interface.

------
grey-sunshine
People just love to hate unity. Haters are losers.

------
Kenji
"Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops,
Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu
desktop back to GNOME next year."

Yes, yes yes! That's fantastic! I hate Unity and I love GNOME. Good choice.
Too bad it's going to be April 2018 until then, but this should teach anyone:
It's never too late to revert a stupid design decision!

~~~
josteink
> "Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops,
> Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu
> desktop back to GNOME next year."

Now imagine if 6 years ago Canonical had spent all that time and effort into
improving existing DEs and implementing Wayland-support instead of their
(already then) NIH initiatives.

Where would we all be now? Certainly not still stuck in this same, unimproved
X11 sinkhole (yes yes, apart from Fedora-users, I know).

Such a shame they had to spend more than half a freakin decade to realize
their mistake.

~~~
Scarblac
> Certainly not still stuck in this same, unimproved X11 sinkhole

I really don't care about it being X11 under the hood, I care about the
sidebar on the left being gone.

~~~
tracker1
I prefer it there.. if Windows start menu weren't weird on the left, I'd have
it there too... my mac dock is on the left as well. I have more horizontal
space than I typically use, while vertical is at a premium.

~~~
Scarblac
I use fullscreen windows only, so all the space is used all the time anyway.

I think that had they made its position configurable as half the Internet
asked for since the start, Unity would have been way less hated.

Anyway, there's still a top bar, the one that has the clock and so on. Two
bars doesn't save space.

------
swayvil
It's about time.

------
crudbug
They should get behind Enlightenment. I hear Samsung is big on it.

------
api
Thank God. That thing is and always was an abomination.

~~~
shock
Nobody was forcing you to use it. I found Unity had the best usability from
all the OSes, including macOS and Windows.

~~~
tracker1
I like the windows taskbar a little more... but prefer the top-bar (similar to
mac), and don't care for the mac dock nearly as much as either. Unity is
definitely better out of the box than most linux DEs imho.

------
sqeaky
The link to Shuttleworth's blog is failing with error 110: connection timeout.
I am glad the article provides a reasonable summary.

EDIT - I am curious why I am being downvoted. Is the article not a reasonable
summary?

~~~
slitaz
Interesting articles are copied on this website:
[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/)

