News
Canonical in turmoil as it drops Unity 8, Mir (sort of) and Ubuntu phone, while axing jobs mean turbulent times for the company and people behind Ubuntu.
Unpleasant news from Canonical Towers, dropping of Unity, dropping of Mir, dropping of staff, but we’ll have Gnome and Wayland in the future.
News has been coming thick and fast from the Canonical camp recently, with major new developments happening even as we go to press. It all started at the beginning of April 2017 when Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, announced in a blog post ( http://bit.ly/2pGH63j) that Canonical would stop working on Unity 8 and Mir, saying that the Ubuntu desktop will “shift back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.”
Perhaps the biggest news of all was that Canonical is also dropping its goal of putting Ubuntu on smartphones and tablets. While the Ubuntu-powered smartphones that have already been released have been met with a poor critical (see Reviews LXF197, LXF212) reception, Canonical had until recently maintained that its vision of ‘Convergence’ – where Ubuntu worked across desktop and mobile devices – was vital to the company.
That has now all changed, with Shuttleworth admitting that he made a mistake when he “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.” He concludes “I was wrong on both counts.”
In the blog post, Shuttleworth admits that contrary to Canoncial’s aims for convergence, its efforts were seen by the community as “fragmentation not innovation”. Many people were concerned that Canoncial’s strategy of chasing after the mobile market – which is dominated by Android and Apple – was taking resources away from the desktop version of Ubuntu, which would then suffer.
Instead, Shuttleworth emphasised Canonical’s “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.”
Stripped of PR speak, that means Ubuntu is going to focus on Ubuntu for desktops, servers, virtual machines, as well as snaps and Ubuntu Core for IoT (Internet of Things) embedded devices. Cloud infrastructure technology will also continue to be worked on.
While not many people will mourn the passing of Ubuntu Phone the announcement has wider implications for Canoncial and Ubuntu. By dropping Unity 8, Ubuntu will return to using GNOME as its interface, with Shuttleworth confirming on his personal Google+ account that Canonical “will invest in Ubuntu GNOME with the intent of delivering a fantastic all-GNOME desktop”, which all but confirms that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will come with the GNOME Shell.
Despite Canoncial’s high hopes for Unity, it also looks like we won’t be getting a heavily modified version of GNOME – and will instead get the vanilla experience. “We’re helping the Ubuntu GNOME team, not creating something different or competitive with that effort. While I am passionate about the design ideas in Unity, and hope GNOME may be more open to them now, I think we should respect the GNOME design leadership by delivering GNOME the way GNOME wants it delivered.” However, as the month went on, the full implications of Canonical’s move became apparent.
“Ubuntu is going to focus on Ubuntu for desktops, servers, virtual machines, snaps and IoT.”