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2

The default desktop environment in Ubuntu 18.04 is going to be gnome-shell instead of Unity 8.

Does this mean development of Unity is stopped? or just that we can expect it to be beta a bit longer?

source on insights.ubuntu.com post by Mark Shuttleworth.
phoronix also posted about it here and here about the job cuts

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closed as off-topic by user68186, Anwar, Zanna, Pilot6, Gerhard Burger Apr 6 '17 at 10:10

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

  • "Bug reports and problems specific to development version of Ubuntu should be reported on Launchpad so that developers can see, track and fix these issues." – user68186, Anwar, Pilot6, Gerhard Burger
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phoronix.com seems down , seems the news is causing heavy traffic towards the site – tomodachi Apr 5 '17 at 18:25
5  
This topic is of interest to many users of this site. However, any answer would be speculative and opinion based at best. – user68186 Apr 5 '17 at 19:01
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All answers to this question would be based on guess at this point – Anwar Apr 5 '17 at 19:04
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@Anwar but our BOFH does frequent this site so there is at least 1 person that can answer this question not based on guesses :) – Rinzwind Apr 6 '17 at 8:18
    
I'd also say the decision is frustrating and rude to its users. They weren't listening to the users at early days of Unity and they don't seem listening still. They should have weighted user's opinion more – Anwar Apr 6 '17 at 9:58
up vote 2 down vote

Ars Technica has quotes from a Canonical employee (emphasis mine):

This is a return to the early years of Ubuntu, when the desktop shipped with GNOME instead of a Canonical-developed user interface. Shuttleworth's blog post didn't specifically say that phone and tablet development is ending. But Canonical Community Manager Michael Hall confirmed to Ars that the Ubuntu phone and tablet project is over.

"Work on the phone and tablet is also ending, the whole convergence story, really," Hall said. "The desktop will continue, but like it was in the pre-Unity days where we took what upstream [developers] designed and developed."

[...]

By switching to GNOME, Canonical is also giving up on Mir and moving to the Wayland display server, another contender for replacing the X window system. Given the separate development paths of Mir and Wayland, "we have no real choice but to use Wayland when Ubuntu switches to GNOME by default," Hall told Ars. "Using Mir simply isn't an option we have."

Since they're now falling back to upstream stuff, there's no reason to expect Unity to remain in development as a beta or any other form.

Also note that development != maintenance.

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up vote 3 down vote

It's quite early to say, but unity 7 will be supported for the lifetime of 16.04, and probably longer, either by the community or canonical itself.

Development of unity 8 might continue by the community, although I doubt this because a lack of community support is exactly why they are abandoning the project.

Mir development will also probably end because the only DE that was using Mir was unity 8, and there was community pushback against this because we now had three competing display servers, of which two new ones.

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