Ubuntu GNOME

» see ubuntugnome.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ubuntu GNOME started as Ubuntu GNOME Remix, an unofficial rebuild of Ubuntu for people who wanted the GNOME desktop that Ubuntu had replaced with one of its own design. The first stable version was 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, released on 18 October 2012, and it existed for exactly one reason: Unity had been the default since 11.04 in April 2011 and a sizable part of the user base never made peace with it.

Canonical adopted it. From 13.04 it was an official Ubuntu flavor with a place on the download page and a slot in the release schedule, which is a slightly odd thing for a project whose entire premise is disagreeing with the default. It shipped ten releases across four and a half years, tracking GNOME versions rather than inventing anything, and it did the unglamorous work of keeping a second desktop integrated against an Ubuntu base that was not aiming at it.

Most of what gets written up here I have to read about. This one I was standing next to. Any computer engineer working through that decade had a position on Unity whether or not they ever downloaded this particular ISO, because the desktop on the machine you earn a living with stops being a matter of taste quite fast. It becomes muscle memory, and then it becomes an argument.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why it existed at all ~

Unity was Canonical's attempt to design its own interface rather than ship somebody else's, and in 2011 that was a defensible call. The problem was that GNOME 3 arrived the same year with its own answer to the same questions, and the two diverged far enough that software written for one felt wrong on the other. Anybody who preferred the upstream answer was left assembling it by hand on top of an Ubuntu install.

Ubuntu GNOME turned that assembly job into an ISO. Packaging is the entire deliverable here, and the labor in it is real: integration, plus an installer that does not hand you two overlapping session managers and a login screen unsure which one it belongs to. Ten releases of that work went out on the Ubuntu release schedule, tracked against upstream GNOME, maintained by a community flavor team rather than by Canonical's own desktop staff.

~ eight days in april ~

On 5 April 2017 Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical was ending work on Unity 8 and that Ubuntu would ship GNOME as its desktop again. On 13 April the Ubuntu GNOME team released 17.04 Zesty Zapus, and the release post, written by Jeremy Bicha and Tim Lunn, carried the ending in its own title: released, and what's next. There would be no separate GNOME flavor, because the flavor was about to become the distribution.

~ the strange shape of winning ~

Most dead software here died because somebody with a budget stopped caring. This one died because the argument it was making was accepted in full. Every line of code it existed to work around got deleted by the people who had written it, and the result was that the project had nothing left to be.

The handover was less tidy than the announcement. Everybody had been pointed at 18.04 LTS, and then mainline Ubuntu moved to GNOME six months early, at 17.10 in October 2017. That left Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 as a terminal release with a nine-month support window and no successor to upgrade into. Support ended on 13 January 2018. Anyone who wanted to stay on an LTS had to sit on 16.04 for another year and then land in a desktop assembled by a different team.

ubuntugnome.org returns a 503 with a 108-byte body today. The project page on wiki.ubuntu.com is still up and still lists 17.04 as the final stable release, which is what a free software grave usually looks like. Nobody deletes the documentation. It just stops changing, and the last thing written in it stays true.

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