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Ubuntu Unity needs help as teen maintainer hits the books (www.theregister.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by cm0002@lemmy.zip to c/linux@programming.dev

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The Ubuntu Unity project is in trouble because its maintainer, a Linux whiz kid, has had less time to work on it due to his studies. Now other team members are appealing to the wider Ubuntu community for help.

Taking to the Ubuntu forums earlier this week, Unity team member Maik Adamietz admitted that things in Unityland aren't faring that great, and for a perfectly good reason that no one can really fault it for. Project leader Rudra Saraswat, who created the Unity Remix project in 2020 to rescue the replaced-by-GNOME interface from obscurity when he was just 10 years old, suddenly has other things on his plate.

Now a teenager, Saraswat is busy with his studies and simply can't dedicate the time to keep Unity operating properly.

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[–] cabbage@piefed.social 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces

What a terrible takeaway. I'd rather say that the takeaway is that all things come to an end, even Unity 7 which it's honestly incredible didn't die ages ago.

Those interested in keeping on working on Unity should perhaps focus their efforts instead on Lomiri, the community continuation of Unity 8 and default environment in Ubuntu Touch.

Here's a demonstration from two months ago, running desktop apps like Librewolf on an external monitor powered by Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4. It is of course not limited to Ubuntu Touch; Ubuntu Touch is just the only distro where it's the default interface.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

Agree. Here is a different take.

Unity was created by a corporation with massive resources. It was abandoned when that corporation changed its priorities. If proprietary, Unity would have died long ago.

Due to the efforts of a 10 year old volunteer, it was fully modernized and became quite popular again, offered in many distros. The lifetime of Unity as a project has already been extended by years. A 10’tear old kid. That is the power of Open Source.

The main contributor is not able to work on Unity right now. Others can take up the effort, because it is Open Source. That includes any user or group of users that live or rely on it. The opportunity is available to anyone.

Absolute worst case, the world already got more Unity than it would have. And it could be revived at any time.