Post by cjm on Apr 10, 2017 8:04:54 GMT
Ubuntu switches to GNOME desktop and gives up smartphone hopes
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In some ways, it was an easy choice. Shuttleworth wrote, "The cloud and IoT story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve. You all probably know that most public cloud workloads, and most private Linux cloud infrastructures, depend on Ubuntu. You might also know that most of the IoT work in auto, robotics, networking, and machine learning is also on Ubuntu, with Canonical providing commercial services on many of those initiatives."
But, it was also a painful one. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had invested blood, sweat, and tears in its Unity interface for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, and its smartphone. Shuttleworth said, "I took the view that if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free-software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts. In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation."
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Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence
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I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
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In some ways, it was an easy choice. Shuttleworth wrote, "The cloud and IoT story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve. You all probably know that most public cloud workloads, and most private Linux cloud infrastructures, depend on Ubuntu. You might also know that most of the IoT work in auto, robotics, networking, and machine learning is also on Ubuntu, with Canonical providing commercial services on many of those initiatives."
But, it was also a painful one. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had invested blood, sweat, and tears in its Unity interface for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, and its smartphone. Shuttleworth said, "I took the view that if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free-software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts. In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation."
...
Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence
...
I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
...