Ubuntu 18.04 To Ship with GNOME Desktop, Not Unity

[jerrygab2]

Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence

Mark Shuttleworth said that he is discontinuing Unity and convergence. Interesting

 

[Brent W]

I agree with this move. Ubuntu needs to concentrate on making Linux more rock solid and stick with the rest of the community.

 

[sdowney717]

I use gnome ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Surprised about this. But I agree.
Gnome also has some weirdness to it, but I have stuck with it and never liked unity desktop.
I never liked the discontinuity in unity menu, when you run a program, the associated program menu is disjointed from the app window.

 

[Brent W]

I have run into so many UI glitches and annoyances on Unity. It has never been close to polished from my use of it.

 

[chevyontheriver]

I use gnome ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Surprised about this. But I agree.
Gnome also has some weirdness to it, but I have stuck with it and never liked unity desktop.
I never liked the discontinuity in unity menu, when you run a program, the associated program menu is disjointed from the app window.

Gnome used to be great and then they really messed with it in Gnome3.0. I deserted and went to LXDE. Works really well for my RAM challenged old laptop. But I'm back to Gnome now on my desktop running Fedora 25. I'm prepared to say that after almost being a suicide, Gnome is back. I think.

 

[Wookiee]

Hopefully they fix up GNOME then. I find it even harder to use than Unity.

 

[chevyontheriver]

Hopefully they fix up GNOME then. I find it even harder to use than Unity.

Gnome 2 was pretty good for users. But it was a complex mess of code.
Gnome 3.0 simplified the code but displeased most users, including Linus Torvalds.
Gnome 3.24 is pretty decent, having fixed most of what was broken in 3.0 version.
For me it has been OK, although I like the simplicity of LXDE too.

 

[A3M0N]

This is good news! I think I used Unity for about a week, and switched to Xfce via Xubuntu. I don't think I'll ever use anything else!

I've used Gnome, before Unity, and also ran the "Ubuntu GNOME" disto, but I went back to Xubuntu.

 

[elytron]

I have some questions. Will 18.04 be an LTS release? And when will it be ready? Release schedules are kind of confusing to me. If this is actually true, I may give regular Ubuntu another chance. At the moment I am a linux-mint/ubuntu-mate user. The MATE desktop is just a fork of the older gnome, I believe.

Yesterday I attempt to install Manjaro Linux on my super old laptop. I have two laptops at the moment, and one desktop. The installer kept crashing though. So I re-installed Ubuntu-MATE. Also had trouble installing LXLE Linux, I like to test various Linux distro on my older machine.

 

[negativeflare]

I'm quite happy about them getting rid of Unity

 

[jerrygab2]

Will 18.04 be an LTS release?

Yes

And when will it be ready?

The haven't said yet as far as I can tell.

 

[AWorkInProgress]

Unity was very unique, but I really couldn't enjoy it. Found myself installing other desktop experiences. Finally landing with MATE. MATE been great, but now I like something more responsive. GNOME 3 with tweaks has been a great experience. Same MATE feel, with responsiveness I was looking for.

 

[Sketcher]

The good: They're getting rid of Unity.
The bad: They're going back to GNOME.

 

[Qyöt27]

Release schedules are kind of confusing to me.

See below.

And when will it be ready?

The haven't said yet as far as I can tell.

Yes, they have. Ubuntu makes releases every six months, in April and October. This is referenced explicitly in the version numbers: YY.MM (16.04 was released in 2016 April). The only exception to this was the very first LTS release, 6.06 "Dapper Drake". It was supposed to be a typical six-month April release, but then the idea of LTSes came about and the release was pushed back to June to ready it for being an LTS instead. But every other release in the 11 years since that happened has been in either April or October.

tl;dr: 18.04 is the release slated for 2018 April.

 

[Qyöt27]

Personally, the presence or non-presence of Unity means nothing to me. It was little more than a toy as far as I was concerned - and one of the articles about the decision to drop them confirmed that insisting on Unity and Mir ended up costing Canonical millions of dollars in revenue, so it wasn't just a certain vocal faction of casual users that hated that particular direction. Maybe with Unity getting forked by the UBports project, some of the actually interesting functionality can mature in a community-driven way that wasn't possible before.

I just install standard Ubuntu and then pull LXDE in on top of it, although I did install Lubuntu proper on a couple of desktops and Ubuntu MATE on another. Come 18.04 and the main distribution switching back to GNOME, I'll still be doing that.

I do, however, really like what I've seen with Budgie (which now has its own official flavor instead of being a community remix), but it really doesn't like being installed on my current computer - more than likely it's because the computer in question is a somewhat obscure mini-PC and there's a hardware conflict somewhere. The Live USB runs fine, but when installed to a normal, dedicated partition it refuses to log in properly and either drops back to LightDM or gets stuck in a half-initialized form where you can't sudo anything (even if you Alt+F1 and drop to a shell) and the interface doesn't completely load.