Ubuntu 18.04 To Ship with GNOME Desktop, Not Unity. Ubuntu phone and convergence shell have been canceled.

jeremy · 04-05-2017, 12:31 PM

From Mark on the Ubuntu Blog:

Quote:

I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

I’d like to emphasise our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on. We will continue to produce the most usable open source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it.

We care that Ubuntu is widely useful to people who use Linux every day, for personal or commercial projects. That’s why we maintain a wide range of Ubuntu flavours from both Canonical and the Ubuntu community, and why we have invested in the Ubuntu Phone.

I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts.

In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility, instead taking a ‘better the devil you know’ approach to those form factors, or investing in home-grown platforms. 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.

...

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. We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile.

The choice, ultimately, is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company. Those are Ubuntu itself, for desktops, servers and VMs, our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kubernetes) our cloud operations capabilities (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), and our IoT story in snaps and Ubuntu Core. All of those have communities, customers, revenue and growth, the ingredients for a great and independent company, with scale and momentum. This is the time for us to ensure, across the board, that we have the fitness and rigour for that path.

What do LQ members think of this news?

--jeremy

Jeebizz · 04-05-2017, 02:03 PM

I was more interested in the Ubuntu phone, so I guess that is out of the question now. I am very much interested in a Linux phone - Android is ok - but I would like a phone that gives me full access, and not have to use an exploit just to gain full control over.

cynwulf · 04-06-2017, 08:23 AM

It seems logical. First upstart was killed to fit upstream Debian's systemd base, next Unity is axed to fit Debian's upstream desktop. gnome-shell now pretty much fits the bill for canonical. Ubuntu is almost back to being Debian with a different theme and a few extra bells and whistles - which is where it all started out. Clearly Ubuntu is not where canonical want to put their investment. It's hardly surprising as Ubuntu's popularity has been declining for years. Shuttleworth may have finally realised what many of us knew years ago: Ubuntu was never going to challenge windows (bug #1) and Ubuntu was never going to be a revenue stream. Android happened, the rest is history.

Unity was open source in the technical sense only. It was created by canonical for it's products and attempts by others to build on other distributions (such as Fedora) ultimately failed. And this is where canonical sadly missed the point. gnome at least produce a desktop which can be built on other distributions and even ported to other *nix. canonical chose to cast all of this aside and go "completely in house" and lose the contributions of thousands of other developers - all working for free and to start hacking libraries, etc.

This is where canonical's model failed and where Red Hat's has undeniably succeeded.

Jeebizz · 04-11-2017, 02:37 PM

This is a long video but an interesting interview with Cosimo Gecchi on the Lunduke Hour:

Bryan Lunduke - "GNOME w/Cosimo Cecchi" - Lunduke Hour - Apr 10, 2017

Quote:

Published on Apr 10, 2017

In this episode of the Lunduke Hour, I talk with GNOME Foundation Director, Cosimo Cecchi. We talk about the future of GNOME, how badly I want a GNOME-powered tablet, and how the recent Ubuntu announcement of moving to GNOME impacts the project.

Jeebizz · 04-13-2017, 07:21 PM

Bryan Lunduke - "Linux Thursday - Future of Ubuntu Phone" - Lunduke Hour - Apr 13, 2017

Quote:

Published on Apr 13, 2017

It's Thursday! And you know what that means... It's Linux Day on the Lunduke Hour! In today's episode I am joined by Matt Hartley -- we talk about a statement we received from Canonical on the plan to wind-down support for Ubuntu Phones, then take a whole slew of your questions.

montagdude · 04-18-2017, 06:18 PM

From day 1 I disliked Unity, and from what I read the phone was always kind of half-baked, but this has to hurt for them. Those projects represent years of investment and focus for their company.

jeremy · 04-20-2017, 08:23 AM

For those interested in the topic we discussed it at length on the most recent Bad Voltage: http://www.badvoltage.org/2017/04/20/2x08/

--jeremy