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.
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.
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.
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
@jplebreton ....I mean, the GNOME project hasn't exactly been free of NIH, to be perfectly honest...
@jplebreton whoa what / yes exactly, can u imagine all those hours of work went into gnome3 and wayland instead
@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