JP
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/ Ubuntu 18.04 will ship with GNOME desktop, abandoning Unity shell and "convergence" vision. No mention of Mir. This is pretty huge news, if long due. It's still baffling to me that they struck off on their own with Mir rather than embracing Wayland, which is now shipping as default in many distros.
Apr 5, 2017 at 6:20pmWeb
Show threadJPApr 5, 2017
A possible takeaway from this is that desktop UI is simply no longer area where you can stand out / make money by innovating in. I hope groups like Elementary keep trying though, as there are still many incremental improvements that potentially benefit billions of users.
I do think that convergence in some form is still the future of computing. CPU-wise most peoples' phones are now powerful enough to do everything they'd want to do on a desktop.
Show thread> [email protected]Apr 5, 2017
@jplebreton i don't think it's so much no room for innovation as it is innovation for innovation's sake rather than toward some actual desirable end is just a horrible idea for anything meant to be used by anyone other than the experimenter. there was a profound lack of consideration for the people who would be affected.
Show threadJPApr 5, 2017
I hope one lesson FOSS as a whole takes from this is that duplication of effort can be an incredible waste. The latest Unity8 video shows a UI that, while slick, doesn't look like it delivers a substantially different user experience from GNOME3 + a dock extension.
My mind reels at the number of person-hours that must have gone into re-implementing a dock, notifications, task switching, etc. This was a large corporation, not one homebrewer scratching an itch.
Show threadJPApr 5, 2017
One possibility is that the Unity team was doing really good work considering the circumstances and Canonical just never gave them the resources needed for the formidable task of... you know... creating a world-class desktop GUI from the bottom up.
Show threadJPApr 5, 2017
FWIW, any current Unity7 users can get something pretty close (IMO) to it with GNOME 3 and a few extensions, here's my desktop with the "dash to dock" extension & a few others: https://mastodon.social/media/9YafErA6ssfmOI9JIvw
Show threadpettter ✅Apr 5, 2017
@jplebreton ....I mean, the GNOME project hasn't exactly been free of NIH, to be perfectly honest...
Show threadaunt loud ✅ [super sic]Apr 5, 2017
@jplebreton whoa what / yes exactly, can u imagine all those hours of work went into gnome3 and wayland instead
Show threadArchived + moved, don't followApr 5, 2017
@jplebreton It is very painful to think about all that wasted effort. But I also really didn't expect Canonical to do a 180 like this? Almost want to look into this some more because I find it hard to believe. Almost feel bad for them
Show thread🔜@[email protected]Apr 5, 2017
@jplebreton I didn't know anyone was still working on ubuntu desktop