End of Ubuntu Phone and Unity

[Ahunt]

Here's the link again:

http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/canoni...y-icebergs-tip

Speculative? Yes. Unfounded? No.

Yes, it is totally unfounded speculation, no evidence has been given.

As far as I understand, Canonical is trying to make money providing services to businesses, in the same field that Red Hat does. That includes a full range of IT implementation, including server, cloud, IoT and yes, desktop. There are companies running Ubuntu, with paid Canonical support. If they dropped the desktop they couldn't compete and would lose customers, as they would have a big hole in their product range.

Why on earth would they drop the desktop? As Jeremy Bicha and Tim Lunn of Ubuntu GNOME wrote, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and on, "will be GNOME (including gnome-shell) with minimal Ubuntu customization." The cost of putting this out will be quite small. It wouldn't save anything to drop it.

[Ahunt]

Ubuntu GNOME To Merge with Ubuntu, Will No Longer Be a Separate Flavor, by Joey Sneddon, OMG Ubuntu

[jbicha]

(3) Ubuntu will return to shipping the latest version of GNOME - at least for interim releases.

That has not been decided yet.

[kansasnoob]

That has not been decided yet.

Thanks for the correction. I jumped to that conclusion since 17.04 shipped with GNOME 3.24. I hopped onto the Ubuntu wagon in 2007 and I think sometimes they did use the latest, and other times not? Probably depending on how aggressive the changes are between releases? I mean sometimes the changes are quite minor and other times they seem rather huge.

I corrected that to read "may (or may not)". Thanks again for the heads up. I hope to still see you around in the coming years. It was a pleasure to work with both you and Tim Lunn. With any luck I'll be able to get back into iso-testing this coming fall or winter. I really miss doing that

[neu5eeCh]

If they dropped the desktop they couldn't compete and would lose customers, as they would have a big hole in their product range.

Yeah, I don't think I've written or speculated, anywhere in this thread, that they intend to drop the desktop. Just to be clear (though that is what the linked article suggests.) What I personally am questioning is Canonical's level of commitment.

If they dropped the desktop they couldn't compete and would lose customers...

I don't know enough to agree with or dispute this assertion. We do know that Shuttleworth, in his own statement, doesn't mention the desktop as a source of revenue -- not like Cloud or IoT. One doesn't need a desktop to run a server, after all. As I read Shuttleworth's statement, his commitment to the desktop is one of benevolence, not business.

It's also not clear that he would lose customers. I mean, if you think about it, by switching from Unity back to Gnome, he's clearly intimating that all those paying customers don't care what DE they're running. They only care what the DE is running on. So, my impression is that Shuttleworth only cares about the desktop insofar as it's stable. Beyond that, he's got bigger and more lucrative fish to fry.

Edit: By the way, saying that "no evidence has been given" is different that saying "speculation is unfounded". You can't not speculate if you're discussing the future. And how do you gather evidence for something that hasn't happened yet? Speculation is based, in part, on inference. One may reasonably infer, from Shuttleworth's own statements (not in his oft-quoted initial post but in comments made elsewhere), that the Ubuntu DE is no longer a priority. That's not unfounded but based on Shuttleworth's own statements.

[Ahunt]

Yeah, I don't think I've written or speculated, anywhere in this thread, that they intend to drop the desktop.

Yes you did, in post #160 to this thread:

This means the desktop edition is probably destined to eventually be dropped

You really don't seem to know what arguments you are advancing here.

[kansasnoob]

Mark will be returning to his prior role as CEO:

https://insights.ubuntu.com/?p=66110

So that bumps the number of actual facts surrounding these changes to three:

(1) Ubuntu is dropping Unity in favor of GNOME Shell.
(2) Ubuntu GNOME will no longer produce a separate official flavor.
(3) SABDFL is returning to his prior role as CEO of Canonical.

Everything else involves some degree of speculation

[grahammechanical]

My take on this decision is that it is underscored by the future demise of the X server. Unity 7 runs on X. It was intended that Mir would replace the X Server and Unity 8 which was designed to run on Mir would replace Unity 7.

I am guessing that upgrading Unity 8 from a mobile device GUI to a desktop GUI with all the functionality that is expected of a Linux GUI has proved to be more complex and time consuming than previously thought. Add in the complexity that comes with Unity 8 not running Debian packaged applications and bringing with it the need to package the 1,000s of Linux apps into Snap apps or provide a means of running these applications in a Linux container, and perhaps we can imagine how important the commercial success of Ubuntu phones & tablets was to this vision of a Ubuntu future.

So, in the time honoured FOSS tradition Ubuntu will be taking the work of others and in future it will run on a Gnome built Wayland compositor and use the Gnome 3 shell adapted to run on a Wayland compositor. The developers of other desktop environments will need to do something similar to their DEs In order to remove the X Server as a potential vector for hacking the Linux OS.

Regards.

[BigSilly]

Long time since I last posted. No real reason for that other than Ubuntu is running well for us, and no complaints or issues. All of us very demanding home users have been, and will continue to be happy to use Ubuntu.

But what a week it's been. I just wanted really to add my support to the decision to move to GNOME. Passions are high and it's inevitable we will try to second guess what will happen next. For me, though I have no issue with Unity, I think we all could clearly see this had been in a maintenance cycle since about 2013 or 2014. I think for a few years now it seemed like Unity was very static while other desktop development rocketed ahead on GNOME and KDE. While this wasn't an issue of the moment (because as I say Unity was running well for us), a bit of foresight tells you this can't go on.

Hats off to Mr Shuttleworth for braving it and giving it a go. I'm genuinely sorry it didn't work out, though I still feel he was ahead of the curve with convergence. But I have to applaud the even bigger decision to draw a line under it and move on to GNOME. I've jumped the gun and decided to install Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 and see what we can look forward to, and have to say I feel the GNOME desktop has many similarities to Unity but also is better in many ways. Some slight customisation is all it needs to Ubuntu-ize it (see here).

[cariboo]

I was browsing some news sites yesterday at lunch on my tablet, and I came across an article about where Ubuntu should go next. One of the suggestions was to emulate Red Hat, with enterprise and community editions. I personally think this is a great idea