I have been debating writing about this since we are mainly a gaming news site (I should really setup another site for all the other Linux news I want to write about!), but Canonical switching back to GNOME on Ubuntu is very big news for everyone.
Question: Is there any interest in me doing a separate site to cover general Linux news?
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical wrote a rather shocking blog post announcing that Ubuntu 18.04 will officially drop the Unity desktop environment. If you didn't hear about it due to living under a large rock, let that sink in for a moment. Ubuntu is dropping a desktop environment they've worked on for years and poured tons of resources into building and rewriting for Unity 8.
I've had some time to let the news sink in now, after initially thinking it was a late April fools joke, when in reality it's very real and it makes perfect sense.
Unity was part of a long-term plan for Canonical with Ubuntu as part of their convergence strategy, which ultimately failed to gain any real traction. There's only so much time and money you can put into something when it's not giving you the results you wanted and it seems Canonical is in need of investors, as it turns out it has had to cut its workforce.
This now means there's going to be a little less fragmentation when it comes to the Linux desktop too. For all the good it does having lots of choice, having likely the biggest desktop-Linux distribution use a more standard desktop will help many things. For one thing, developers will no longer have to work around Unity/Compiz specific issues in games. It will also help the stability of GNOME Shell too, since they have even more people using it and working on it thanks to this.
This, in turn, makes Ubuntu go back to what made me originally love it. A polished GNOME desktop experience released every 6 months with the latest and greatest with a little extra love and polish thrown in for good measure. A good, solid desktop experience to introduce people new to Linux with. To me, it sounds fantastic again.
As expected, Unity 8 looks like it will be carried on by a few developers. Will be interesting to see if this actually gains any traction, or if it will fade away with little interest. Personally, I don't see any need to continue it, we have enough desktops already with GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, Budgie, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE and the list goes on and on. Enough already I say, they all vary a lot in terms of features and time could be better spent on many others parts of the Linux desktop now.
Finally, I'm still very happy after switching from Ubuntu to Antergos. I've now settled with the GNOME Shell desktop with two extensions and it's glorious:
I couldn't imagine having to go back to PPAs again to get extra software, my love for the Arch AUR is never ending.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
inlinuxdude Apr 7, 2017
QuoteQuestion: Is there any interest in me doing a separate site to cover general Linux news?
Please stick to doing one thing and doing it well. Don't dilute your time/product...
Quoting: EikeI've been shown a different log in IRC now https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/04/07/%23snappy.html where Mir will stay for IoT devices.Quoting: liamdaweHave they actually confirmed this anywhere? Mir wasn't mentioned in the initial post from Mark.
Ars Technica says that Canonical Community Manager Michael Hall confirmed it to them:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-desktop-will-switch-back-to-gnome-next-year/
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 7 April 2017 at 11:39 am UTC
lucifertdark Apr 7, 2017
ps Snapd or whatever it's called is another one that Canonical should knock on the head.
Mir is also gone, which is good, we don't need fragmentation there when the dev community is still small, let Wayland be the future for now.
This is also the final death for Compiz, a composite manager like we never had before or will have again. The development has already stopped years ago, but it still was used as framework for Unity. Eh, when I just remember what awesome effects Compiz had at its peak, people from other operating systems couldn't believe their eyes.
I'm sorry for the effort and money Canonical lost in development, but it's better for all that they finally decided to give up. I haven't seen what Gnome 3 looks like now, but if I don't like it, I'll just improve it with Cairo.
dmacofalltrades Apr 7, 2017
Quoting: gojulSame for me - I switched to Debian stable 2 years ago and it is soooo stable that I would not go back to an Ubuntu LTS. It is really a step up in term of stability.
This has been my experience with Linux Mint. My main gaming desktop is still Antergos, but I switched back to Mint on my laptop for a more stable experience.
Although I'm not the biggest GNOME fan, I'm more excited about this news than I expected. Probably because this now means that Canonical can contribute to existing stable projects like GNOME and Wayland instead of spending it on resources that would only be used by their distro. That being said, I am sad that they've abandoned their phone. I was hoping to eventually buy one as an alternative to Android.
Quoting: M@GOid...I find funny when people say Unity was a disaster, when the students in my lab never showed problems using it. Very easy to learn DE if you ask me.
Unity was a disaster. But Gnome 3 was a disaster also! Even though I'm sitting on Fedora, I never used Gnome (apart some time at first, just to taste both "Gnome 2" and "KDE 3" and fall to the later). But I know, variety is a strong point of Linux. Come to think of it... in that sense, Mir vs. Wayland was also profitable in some way. It helped to chose the fittest, like in the evolution process. And now the weak shall become food for the strong!
Quoting: M@GOidWith that said, I bet Cannonical will put a makeup in Gnome 3 to make it look like Unity. If not, they will loose more users than they already have.
What? They will go to negative values?
Quoting: liamdaweIs there any interest in me doing a separate site to cover general Linux news?
Hmm .. The 'other' prominent Linux news sites had this story out for a few days now so unless you want to spend all your time trawling through mailing lists like Michel from Phoronix does ( the guy must never sleep ) then i would avoid that. However there is something you could do to improve GOL. keep on improving your benchmarks not just for games but for hardware too.. Of course your not going to initially own all the Nvidia cards or AMD cards, but instead of selling that 980Ti take a chance and keep the thing and invest in an AMD card also ( as you have planned ) this way at least you can properly benchmark games on both Nvidia & AMD.
If you look at Phoronix's most watched news articles it is always MESA / AMDGPU benchmarks & Nvidia hardware / drivers. You don't have to own all the cards, people can get a feel for their card by comparing it to another at least.
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: EikeI've been shown a different log in IRC now https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/04/07/%23snappy.html where Mir will stay for IoT devices.Quoting: liamdaweHave they actually confirmed this anywhere? Mir wasn't mentioned in the initial post from Mark.
Ars Technica says that Canonical Community Manager Michael Hall confirmed it to them:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-desktop-will-switch-back-to-gnome-next-year/
This may be still true, though, on the desktop it won't. IoT devices do not really.. let's say bother us gamers, do they? ;-).
So yes, I'd like you to post news about linux in general, just don't be too obsessive writing at topics that generate traffic through hate and religion like phoronix do.
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