Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)

Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:12 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) by jspaleta
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)

Well they are human.

But I think that it's probably possible for them to change their minds. Call me crazy to think that people can possibly change decisions over the course of months. A grand conspiracy theory about how Shuttleworth planned ahead and lied six months ago in order to somehow (and completely pointlessly) blindside the anti-Ubuntu brigade into compliance is probably the least likely thing that could of happened.

It's worth noting that the Arstechnica article mentions that Unity is to be based on Compiz instead of Mutter. However the the current 'alpha' version of Unity shipping with 10.10 is based off of Mutter. So I expect that they did, in fact, mean Unity to be the compliment of Gnome-shell, but aiming for 'lite' environments. It seems, however, that the Ubuntu folks ended up being displeased with Gnome-shell's progress and direction and decided to just make Unity be the default for everything so they would not have to maintain two different desktops shells.

Also it's worth noting that between Mutter and Compiz the Compiz project is the one that has been more mature and used longer by more people then Mutter. That instead of working on improving and integrating Compiz into something more Gnome-like the Gnome Window Manager folks decided that they should write their own based off of Metacity. Compiz is not something difficult to work with either. It's designed to be extensible from the get-go as you can tell by the wealth of plug-ins and add-ons.

One can just as easily accuse the Gnome project of being victims of NIH syndrome as it is to accuse Ubuntu trying to fork the Gnome desktop. (Also I feel that both statements would be ignorant ones.)

Besides. I've been using Gnome-shell for several months now on Debian I tried out Ubuntu 10.10. Today I installed the netbook add-ons and found that Unity is better. My opinion, of course. I am not crazy about the button ordering, but it works a lot better with Unity and unified menus thrown in.

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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)

Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:27 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Are you seriously saying that you really thought Canonical was going to invest in Unity and _not_ make it the default for its Desktop at some point? Really? Did you even read the blog post from Shuttleworth I referenced.

6 months ago Shuttleworth mentioned that Unity was going to be offered as the basis for an Ubuntu Light desktop directly to OEMs. Not just a netbook offering...but a desktop offering...directly to OEMs. Canonical does not have the manpower to support multiple desktop interfaces with OEM customers.

The only plausible paths moving forward was either Canonical was going to ditch Unity as a failed experiment or double-down on its bets and make it the default for all its supported offerings to streamline its support offerings. It's simple business economics. Canonical isn't profitable. If they are serious about being profitable they have to make a decision and focus on a coherent support strategy. Regardless of what you think about Unity from a technical or political pov, it makes absolutely no business sense to support it as well as other offering that can be made to do the same thing from an engineering business standpoint. The don't support Kubuntu as an OEM offering for the very same reason.

-jef