Wow... Unity, Mir, Ubuntu phone/tablet all going bye bye

[Brian Cluff]

On 04/05/2017 01:40 PM, Matthew Crews wrote:
> Good riddance to Unity. That was essentially an unnecessary fork of 
> Gnome with polarizing opinions (on top of the polarizing opinions of 
> Gnome). I think shifting back to Gnome 3 is the right decision in the 
> long run (especially since Debian uses Gnome 3). That said there are 
> features of Unity I like, but not many.
I'm a little split.  While ultimately I think that not having Unity 
around will better focus development at a more common level; it's sad to 
see so much development time and energy spend on something just to have 
it abandoned.  Hopefully the good parts of Unity will make it into other 
projects so that they can live on.
Too bad they couldn't have decided to shift to KDE... but that's just my 
own self service opinion. :-)
> Where do you see that Mir is going away? Not seeing it in the article. 
> That said, I again agree that Mir is unnecessary when we have Wayland.
I believe that it's implied since Gnome doesn't run on Mir.  I suppose 
there is the possibility that Canonical could spend the next year 
porting Gnome to Mir though without that push to phone/tablet, I don't 
think there is much point to that.
> Ubuntu phone was, in my opinion, as DOA as Firefox OS and Tizen, and 
> Windows Phone.
Yeah, it was a good concept, and I could have taken off if it was the 
first to market, but it's too little too late in a world that already 
had Android.
> Microsoft can't even get convergence right with Windows 10, and they 
> have the money to do it, but then again this is Microsoft we are 
> talking about. Android/Chrome OS are going to be closest we get (and 
> it appears to largely be successful in Samsung's Galaxy S8, app 
> support notwithstanding).
Microsoft's biggest problem with convergence is they have completely 
married themselves to the x86 architecture, and so while MS can create 
an interface for other devices, those devices will largely require 
non-x86 processors to run and the software for those processors just 
isn't there, so Linux ends up with a much much better offering in that 
case, but has a chicken and egg problem. The ultimate filler for that 
niche probably hasn't been made yet.

Brian Cluff