from Hacker News

Dozens of Canonical Employees Resign as Ubuntu Switches to Gnome

by digitalshankar on 4/13/17, 6:19 AM with 9 comments

  • by 4ad on 4/13/17, 6:38 AM

    "Resign". Even the article claims 80 people are axed, not "resigned", and only one guy resigned. Unless they are using United's definition of "volunteering".

    Also, this has nothing to do with switching to Gnome. Employees were axed for business reasons.

  • by partycoder on 4/13/17, 7:21 AM

    It seems Mark Shuttleworth's strategy for Canonical is expand on support, and sunset projects to decrease costs. So far: Mir, Unity, Ubuntu mobile, etc.

    Now, many people suggest to go directly to Gnome, but in reality you have many more aditional desktop manager choices on Ubuntu (tried to limit the list to the ones in active development):

    - GTK based: Gnome, Pantheon, Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE (Gnome 2 fork), XFCE

    - Qt based: KDE, Trinity (KDE 3 fork), LXQt

    - NeXT inspired: GNUStep, Window Maker

    - Others: Enlightment, CDE.

    They all have their tradeoffs.

    If you are used to the MS Windows look and feel, maybe Cinnamon/LXQt/Trinity will be the closest.

    If you are used to the macOS look and feel, maybe Pantheon or MATE may be closer.

    I personally prefer and use Gnome. The Gnome 3 shell is different from everything else (Gnome 2 included), but it was designed trying to minimize distractions. With some tuning (http://extensions.gnome.org) you can adapt it to your needs.

    KDE is fine, but most applications I use are GTK based, so I picked a GTK desktop environment.

    XFCE is great and performant but hasn't received many updates lately. Development is still active though (https://blog.xfce.org/).

  • by jlgaddis on 4/13/17, 7:33 AM

      $ ping mods
    This should point directly to the article on The Register [0] instead of being a link to a Slashdot submission that links to the article.

    Maybe update the title to the original one ("Canonical sharpens post-Unity axe for 80-plus Ubuntu spinners") instead of Slashdot's embellished title, too?

    Slashdot's title: "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign ..."

    Quoting the article: "One individual has resigned ..."

    On a side note, I'm kinda surprised to see that Slashdot actually still exists.

    [0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/80_canonical_staff_...

  • by slitaz on 4/13/17, 6:57 AM

    Slashdot is not an original source of news, does not offer much insightful commenting, and they mess up with the titles to provoke clicks.

  • by mtgx on 4/13/17, 6:46 AM

    I'm sure most of the Mir guys were frustrated and wanted to quit, but to me it looks like Canonical needed to become much leaner, too, so it had to let some people go anyway. Perhaps it offered those who wanted to go the opportunity to do so, rather than get fired.