A FAILED UNITY

Well ... this one is a surprise.

The firm Canonical has announced its ending it's work on the Unity project. Unity was basically a GUI, Graphical User Interface, for Ubuntu what is an Operating System which is built on Linux ... which is kinda ... a version, free one, of Unix.

Confused?

Yeah well that's probably why it failed.

And did I say I was surprised?

Yeah, I was only surprised by the fact this was reported on in the BBC News app!

I had a little try of Unity and Ubuntu on a laptop and I was not impressed. It was also overheating my laptop which was shutting itself down.

I ... published an article or piece somewhere criticising Unity and Ubuntu and basically got rid my some idiot fanboys that I was a newbie and did not know what I was talking about.

Funny then that we fast a forward a few years and not only is there this announcement that its ending, in part, but that there is also a mention of difficulties with laptops.

Funny, no one who criticised me mentioned that there was a long running issue getting it to work on laptops.

I was criticised for trying to run it on an AMD Radeon as apparently they didn't work so well as they did not have an open system when it cage to drivers. I stated that this only made things even worse! I pointed out that there are not one but TWO companies producing graphics cards and that you would think that was something with warning people about?!

No ... all I heard and read was how fantastic the OS was, easy to install and worked great. Umm ... no.

What my critics failed to know, as is often the case with fanboys in anything that are obviously brain dead, is that I have a BSc Single Honours Degree in Applied Computing.

They also failed to realise I'm somewhat older than your average teenager by more years than I care to admit.

But what this does mean is I had a Binatone Pong gaming system, Atari 2600, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore Amiga and my first PC was a Pentium 2.

I also built one of the first SLI rigs with an Athlon64 and two Before 6800GT's. Or was it 8800? I forget. It was around a month or so before CustomPC did an article on it and his difficult it was. 

Umm ... no it wasn't. Well ... except for the fact it didn't occur to me that I had to install the GPU driver twice!!

No, nor did they know that I set up my PC to dual boot with various operating systems which included Linux RedHat 4.5, I think it was, back around 1998. Now that was a pain in the arse. Considering attending lectures and assignments to complete it took me two days to get it working. One lecturer I was friendly with said I would not get it working. The look on his face when I told him that I had got Windows and RedHat dual booting but that it did take two days.

One again, like the damned SLI setup it never occurred to me they might use different file formats and to achieve this you had to use specific partitions a certain way and think about the boot sector.

Yeah but if you've played around with something for five minutes you get the right to accuse everyone else of being thick newbies if you don't praise the thing you love.

Hey?! At least in this case it's something that is free they have not paid through the nose for.

The reason I tried it again is like I said with RedHat all those years ago, Linux needs to go a long way before it will become relevant. That was because back then they said it would overtake Windows eventually. "Not anytime soon out won't" I said to this remark.

The funny thing is I see people saying that when I run down the operating system.

On the one hand they said it was better than Windows and would overtake it in its market share.

But they also said it was an operating system for people who liked to 'tinker'. Errr no.

Those two things don't go together and of you just want to get things done you can't have something you need to keep buggering about with.

It also needs to be bloody intuitive for it to ever come close to the number of installs Windows has.

The funny thing is something else that also runs on a Unix, is it actually Linux as I forget, core gets launched and does overtake Windows to boot ...

Android.

Boy I would have hated being Mark Shuttlecock or worse still, anyone who had been working on Linux for like well over ten years. To watch Android just get launched and then rocket upwards.

Funny thing is I'm not a fan of Android either and it seems to have developed faults and bad habits as it is supposed to get better.

I really wouldn't want an Android desktop computer! Nor, even, a laptop.

Maybe one day someone might actually being out a version of Linux where I know I could give up Windows entirely?

I just hope that wait is not as long as my last one from RedHat 4.5 to Ubuntu 14.6, I think it was, Pangolin ... that one?

Maybe if Canonical had just concentrated on desktops and laptops we might have already gotten one?

Oddly I never liked the look of many of the other Linux distros, Mint probably being about the best outside of Unity.

I might build a PC to run Linux on later this year and I'll look into the GUI's then to see what's on offer.

I guess I can stop searching for that Ubuntu Phone now?

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it: Ubuntu ends Unity software unification project - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39490848