Mark Shuttleworth
With a sad heart Ubuntu, through the mouth of its founder Mark Shuttleworth, has decided to pull the plug on a couple of projects (unity, phones, convergence) under its wings. According to him:
“…I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity 8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.”
UBUNTU GNOME DESKTOP
As regarding convergence for Linux. It is a shock for people like me that wanted a converged Linux experience – a unified experience for desktop, phones, tablets and even IoT – for the average user. And no doubt it is obvious that convergence is the future of the ultimate computer experience. And luckily Canonical would continue to work on its Ubuntu development for IoT.
UBUNTU PHONE AND TABLET (CONVERGENCE IN ACTION)
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against GNOME as a DE, but for me unity means a lot, and I believe it is so for a many Ubuntu Linux users. Anyway I’m still kinda hopeful for Unity, even though its a bit of a long shot. This hope is based on the underlining philosophy of the FOSS community. It is a world where another person or group of persons (possibly another company) can pick the projects up, since there is access to the source code. They could be improved upon them to share with the general public at a later time. Like I said before, its going to be a long shot but im optimistic. One reason of this optimism is in the tune of Mark Shuttleworth:
“…this has been , personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction inn 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.”
According to him the projects were not being dropped by canonical because they were lame or unnecessary projects, but instead as a result of simply “money” (i.e. the economic sustainability).
Even though I don’t favour fragmentation in the Linux community. I hope these decisions come out best for the Linux-ers community, especially those on the desktop.
What do you think about this Ubuntu development? Hit up in the comments section below.
Happy Linux’NG!
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