Hopefully this means that Wayland is now the unified future for the Linux desktop.

I don't think it would be too hard for Canonical to create some installed by default extensions and themes to make Unity users feel more at home in Gnome. The global menu is the only thing I can think of that would maybe be a little too tricky to be worth the effort.

Wayland is the future is now the equivalent of the year of the Linux Desktop.

In a way, maybe the year of the Linux Desktop was more convincing. At least people knew why they wanted that.

Wayland is already the default in Fedora 25 and with Gnome on Ubuntu 18.04, it will most certainly be, too.

Same here. I love the keyboard friendliness out of the box, and especially how sparingly it uses vertical space.

I like gnome3 visually, but some design choices by the gnome team I don't understand. While unity uses a global menu, which displays the menu items in several columns, The gnome global menu has 1 column, with for most apps a single entry (quit).

A blog post by Allan Day addresses the vertical space issue: https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-....

I'm hoping Canonical can cook up a custom suite of extensions to make the GNOME desktop more unity like and maybe even more usable in general.

I'm fairly sure implementing unity/mac style global menus on GNOME can be done with an extension.

And if they don't contribute as much to the desktop, we'll probably see improvements in other areas such as performance.

Well, Canonical was heavily involved with Mir because of Unity, right? So, with this change, I guess we can expect a Wayland related news in the following weeks/months.

BTW, I would go even further: will they still invest in the Snap package or they will do the same and go to a community oriented package system?

Going back to GNOME implies going with Wayland, as Wayland is built-in to GNOME. Wayland isn't like X11, you can't just run the desktop on a different display server.

Snap is explicitly mentioned as one of the things they want to focus more on.

Do they never learn?

Snaps have very real advantages for both users and developers. I'm in favour of them!

Can you name these advantages over Flatpak?

Flatpak is designed for desktop and relies on that environment, snap is designed for both server and desktop use.

For servers there's docker which works great already. We'll see.

What's wrong with Snaps? I'd say it's a good approach in many cases.

Upstream GNOME is working on Flatpak, so is Ubuntu going to ship GNOME or GNOME-with-Flatpak-stripped-out?

Okay, but from what I've seen Snaps are better (from the perspective of flexibility and simplicity) than Flatpak, isn't this a case where it'd be better for GNOME to adapt rather than vice versa?

We'll see, atm Flatpak has already been adapted pretty well: https://kamikazow.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/adoption-of-flatp...

Try the Firefox Nightly for example: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

In distros yes, but in market snappy has been well received https://partners.ubuntu.com/programmes/iot . For me the next move of which package manager will be adopted is gonna be based on companies which are gonna develop on it and get support. Only when Red Hat enters the game, you'll see a big adoption of snaps. For now, Canonical is ahead in this game.

If they are going to integrate gnome with snaps and snaps having an actual market, I doubt flatpak can compete against them. BUT, it would be easier for Canonical if they do something with their CAL, that'd be the real game changer.

There is nothing to strip out. The GNOME Software app (an app store) has an optional Flatpak plugin but except for that, nothing in GNOME depends on Flatpak.

But they can change their minds, as they show in this post

Just for IoT or for desktop, too?

> I wonder what this means for Mir vs Wayland as well.

In my understanding, GNOME Shell doesn't support Mir, only X11 and Wayland, so.

TIL, thank you!

Gtk has a Mir backend, GNOME Shell does not.

Making GNOME look like Unity is simple. Getting it to work like Unity is a bit different. The main difference being the global menu bar.

Gnome has a global menu bar by default now, I think I had to use the tweak tool to turn it off.

Can you give reference about global menu in gnome shell? I can only find old reference to some attemp to implement it[0].

I have tried gnome shell in the past, but I still prever unity because of the global menu.

[0] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-globalmenu

I was wrong sorry. It has a single global menu item for the current application which is distinct from the full app menu.