What now for Unity?
Is this the end of the road for the desktop environment?
One of the biggest questions hanging over Canoncial’s abrupt dropping of Unity is what will happen to the desktop environment – and the versions of Ubuntu that are currently running it. For seven years Canoncial has been concentrating on Unity after dropping GNOME, and since Ubuntu 11.10, Unity has been the default desktop for the distro.
For the time being, it looks like not a huge amount will change. Unity hasn’t had any major updates for a while now, instead getting a few minor adjustments to make sure it continues to work. Unity should still get some updates, then, in the future, to make sure people using it aren’t left completely unsupported.
As Mark Shuttleworth stated, “Unity 7 packages will continue to be carried in the archive. I know there are quite a few people who care enough about it to keep it up to date.” Also, while Canoncial will revert to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, that won’t be released until April 2018. Before that, two version of Ubuntu will release, 17.04 and 17.11.
Both of these releases will continue to use Unity 7. Unity 7 will also be available in next year’s version of Ubuntu, according to Shuttleworth. “I expect it will be in-universe for 18.04 LTS.” As with so many open source projects, it looks like the community will come to the rescue, with many people pledging to continue working on Unity 7 – and even the unfinished Unity 8. Marius Gripsgård, a developer who worked on Unity, said on his Google+ account that “I’m not giving up! I will do my best to keep Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8 standing on both its legs!”
Ubports has also stepped up to continue development for Unity 8, and has a project website at https://unity.ubports.com. There, it explains that “After the announcement that Canonical will stop investing in Unity 8, we stepped forward stating that we will continue development for Unity 8. The reason why we will do that is that we believe in convergence, we believe convergence is the thing people want in the future, and now that desktop is slowly decreasing in users ... investing in mobile is a smart move in our opinion.”
This is an important reminder that just because Canonical is no longer working on Unity, it’s not the end for the project. The beauty of open source software is that if you don’t agree with a company’s decision to stop working on something, you can work on it yourself. Canonical is also ceasing work on its Mir display server. But, as Canonical has reiterated its support for Ubuntu on IoT, which often relies on Mir, it looks like it will continue to be updated by Canonical – just not for the desktop Ubuntu.