14 DAY TRIAL // Following yesterday's article regarding the possibility that the Ubuntu community might not be too keen to adopt the new Unity 8, Mark Shuttleworth provides us with a very interesting piece of information that will make a lot of Ubuntu users happy.
We wrote yesterday about the fact that major changes for desktop environments, like the switch from GNOME 2 to Unity, GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, or KDE 4.x to KDE 5.x, are usually met with some resistance from the community. The same thing might happen when the new Unity 8 finally ships, although the Ubuntu devs have assured us that the differences from Unity 7 won't scare people away.
The new Unity 8 is now being shipped with Ubuntu Touch, the operating system developed for mobile devices. For now, it can only be tested if you have a Nexus 4 or a Nexus 7 device, but that should change pretty soon. In any case, the Unity 8 desktop environment is vastly different from anything that might arrive on the desktop flavor and it will be a while until the switch is made.
Unity 8 will be opt-in until people agree that it's better than Unity 7
The current Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) features the latest iteration of Unity 7, and the devs are working to make Unity 8 the default desktop in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The launch date for that distro is still almost two years into the future, so there is more than enough time to perfect the desktop for the regular Ubuntu users.
"In a long list of life's lessons learned, 'be gentle pushing people onto your new code' is high up. So we won't require U8 for everyone even when it's first class. It will be opt in till most people agree it's better than U7 ," says Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical.
This might not sound like much, but this tells us that the Ubuntu devs are very much aware that the user base can be easily pushed away if the design of the new desktop is too alien from what is being done right now. The Unity 8 version that will eventually be available on Ubuntu OSes must be accepted by the community before any changes are made.
Users can download Ubuntu Next, which is the desktop version that runs Unity 8 right now, but it's not representative in any way of the final product.