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Comment by bratsche | Hacker News Reader

Gnome did no such thing. Unity is developed entirely by Canonical, they own full copyright on it and they employ all the developers for it. They can add any options they want, and they can omit any options they want. Gnome doesn't even factor into this.

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Yeah, it's probably a choice. Both in Gnome and in Unity. Let's not confuse users by too many options and make our phone support as efficient as possible. Or something like that.

I might not like that but there are valid reasons to have dumbed down options. And if I'm not mistaken you can get some configurability out of 3rd party tools.

Is Unity proprietary software? If it was open source I'm surprised it has not been forked by now.

Disclaimer: My knowledge may be out of date.

People have tried to package Unity for other distributions, but those efforts have failed. One of the main problems was the patches that Canonical applies to GNOME libraries (to make Unity work) and to applications (to make them integrate with Unity). If someone wanted to fork Unity they'd have to find a way to handle this to get it fully working on any distribution besides Ubuntu.

Unity has been ported to archlinux a while ago.

https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch

Note the insane amount of packages, most of which are patched versions of packages.

That sounds really nasty. I wonder what the intrinsic issue is?

Unity is based on gnome. It has lots of gnome dependencies.

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