[ubuntu-za] Heard the news: end of unity

[Simon Cross]

I'm fairly happy with the announcement.

I've been using Unity for ages but I've tried Gnome Shell a couple of
times and found it quite similar to Unity in many ways. The Gnome
project have been doing some great things recently (e.g. flatpak) and
since the announcement I've installed Gnome Shell on my personal
laptop and found it slicker and less resource heavy than it used to be
(and I've now switched over entirely).

The unified interface and more open tablets and phones was a grand
idea and it would have been great if it'd worked out, but there are
lots of significant obstacles (mostly outside of writing the software)
and I'm excited to see Canonical re-focus their resources on other
projects.

The more open phones and tablets dream is being carried on by others
(Taizen, Sailfish, etc) and Gnome will continue to evolve Gnome Shell.

All in all, it doesn't seem like a bad outcome for the community as a
whole. Canonical tried something, it didn't work out but it stimulated
the ecosystem and the Linux desktop experience is probably better as a
result.

Schiavo
Simon