Ubuntu abandons its phone efforts, will switch back to Gnome – The Verge | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu abandons its phone efforts, will switch back to Gnome – The Verge

theverge.com

65 pointsrbanffy11 comments

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Could we get this URL changed to the original blog post[0] and the title changed accordingly?

[0]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...

Sorry. Your request came after the edit window closed and I was most probably sleeping.

Looks like there was already a submission of the original blogpost[0]; I just missed it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631

Are we forever going to be stuck with dumbed down, crippled hyper-consumerized phone OS's?

Meego died, Sailfish is bordering on irrelevency, Plasma mobile isn't going anywhere, and now Ubuntu mobile isn't happening.

> Are we forever going to be stuck with dumbed down, crippled hyper-consumerized phone OS's?

As long as Google remains a monopoly and continues to own the Internet, yes.

Isn't Microsoft still in a good position to bring a full features desktop OS to smartphones once their ARM port is complete? I for one am not big into Windows, but if MS continues their current path of integration on continuity I could see it getting to a certain point of "critical mass" where people can have one digital environment for work, leisure times mobilr and stationary and do everything anywhere. Both iOS and Android seem ill suited for that.

I think some people may want to take over Unity 8 and continue developing it. An obvious characteristic of the open source community is divergence, which means forking an existing project or reinventing wheels. Although I'm a GTK developer, I also think Unity is a good desktop environment because of its usability to the non-technical user. But, I still don't like the Canonical's work style that reinvents too many things, such as Bazaar. I like Launchpad for its convenience, while I think Bazaar is awful compared with Git.

Bazaar (bzr) had valid reasons for existing. It predated git and mercurial, being based upon GNU Arch (tla) and baz. At the time, it was pretty cutting edge. While it was eclipsed by later arrivals, we weren't to know that without the benefit of hindsight.

While I never used it, being a tla user at that point in time, I would not criticise it as not being worthwhile or being a pointless reinvention, since it was neither.

Divergence isn't always bad. It's often needed to make any forward progress when the incumbents have stagnated. I'm grateful for all projects which attempt to push the boundaries. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Bazaar didn't, and now it seems Unity didn't. But both were worth the effort put into them.

A bit of background that seams to get lost in the noise is that Unity8(that only ever shipped on mobile) was QT based where as the Uninty7 that still drives the desktop is GTK based?

I wonder if he really meant gnome-shell or just the platform(as unity7 already is) when he claimed that 18.04 would be based on gnome?

On a unrelated note as an owner of(a now flashed to android) Ubuntu tablet i think they made the right choice here as the thing was lacking tablet mode without being a viable laptop/desktop replacement.

Unity 8 looked like a much better unity. Also, gnome 3 is actually weirder then unity was at first, and I think it got unfair backlash for being the first to converge.

My current favorite is KDE Plasma though. It's changed the game for me. Desktop OS all the way, tablets and phones just don't need the same apps and UX. I think convergence can wait or simply doesn't need to happen.

Funny you say that: KDE 4+ was all about convergence. Then all tablet and phone efforts based on it failed pretty spectacularly, and eventually the KDE folks kinda accepted the hard truth that Microsoft also had to swallow: consumers don't care about convergence, what they care about is having the right UI on the right device.

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