More at OMGUbuntu...

What do LQ members think?

--jeremy

I never liked Unity anyways - I supposed GNOME 3 is better than that, but I still would prefer UbuntuMATE or Lubuntu for a lighter distro.

I left ubuntu first for Mint and finally for Fedora, and never regret. The Fedora/Red Hat community is much more competent and friendly. They can help because they have all the knowledge, and that's the difference.

A non-fan of Gnome3, I would have liked to have seen Ubuntu adopt Cinnamon as their default desktop (even though I don't use it), due to the direction Cinnamon is going in and its more traditional desktop metaphor, but I guess that would be too much of a change for those currently using Unity.

Unity is the reason I switched to Xubuntu.

Unity is reason I'm using Cinnamon Mint.

Never understood why they promoted Unity anyway.

To have development control over their own multi-device desktop environment, I would have thought.

Unity drove home the point of Mark Shuttleworth being in charge, community be dammed
there will be more arbitrary decisions in the future

I moved on to an actual community based user friendly distro Mageia
is there a community based user friendly distro downstream of Debian, but not ubun derived?

gnome project very much enforce their default "user experience" and "brand", with quite some zeal and this was very much at odds with what Shuttleworth was trying to achieve with Ubuntu (his "brand" not theirs). Also bear in mind that gnome relies heavily on Red Hat funding and is thus moving in the direction Red Hats wants.

The abandonment of Unity is simply Ubuntu's failure, the beginning of the end of the Ubuntu "brand" and that will become more apparent as time goes on. Letting Ubuntu become gnome based is actually tantamount to pulling the [funding] plug.

Rough translation: "it won't cost us much (if anything) if we use upstream gnome".

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

Quite a stretch there. Never cared for Unity and all of its patches, however, Ubuntu started out as a Gnome distro and Unity was just a heavily patched Gnome DE, so what has really changed? Seems more like full circle to me. Also, If Ubuntu ships stock Gnome then they can focus their attention on the areas making them the most money. I think in the long term, these changes will help Canonical/Ubuntu move towards profitability and most likely launch an IPO to better compete with a larger investor base.

One could say this is Canonical growing up. Perhaps, Ubuntu will spin off as a community distro like Fedora and openSUSE, only time will tell.

Why would this be the end of ubuntu? It is going back to its roots. I use mint currently but I have more the one system to try 18.04 on. Unity project was started when and what progress did it? From what I have read a buggy desktop with patches.

I think it's "quite a stretch" and a big exercise in positive thinking to turn a cut in investment, in what was the "flagship" project, into simply "full circle" or "back to it's roots".

Canonical have consistently failed to make any money from Ubuntu, Unity was conceived as a platform for bringing in revenue and we know how that turned out. They have axed the Unity 8 desktop, which gnome based or not, was the Ubuntu "brand" identity (just as gnome-shell is the gnome brand identity), which Canonical developed in house at it's own expense. And now it has been publicly stated that Mir will not feature in Ubuntu, but will instead be targeted at Canonical's other projects.

To most people, even being as optimistic as possible, this constitutes a scaling back of investment in Ubuntu...