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unity
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🔍 See Original Answer on Ask Ubuntu ⧉ 🔗
URL:
https://askubuntu.com/q/945149
Title:
Why are Unity 7 and Unity 8 discontinued now?
ID:
/2017/08/11/Why-are-Unity-7-and-Unity-8-discontinued-now_
Created:
August 11, 2017
Edited: August 12, 2017
Upload:
April 21, 2025
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Unity will be supported until Ubuntu 16.04 EOL (End of Life) which is April 2021 I believe.
Additionally, with interest by users such as yourself, a “fork” of Unity will be made (perhaps more than one) supported by a third party.
I expect that some of the looks and features of Unity that people have come to know and love will be ported over to the Gnome Desktop Environment (DE) which Ubuntu 18.04 will be based on. Two things to remember are:
- Don’t worry as Unity EOL is a long way off.
- Developers listen to users like yourself and what you request.
This article explicitly quotes reasons for Ubuntu dropping Unity down the road:
“If we are going to take outside money and go public, how efficient do
we need to be?” Shuttleworth said. “In a very cold commercial sense,
we have to bring those numbers into line and that leads to headcount
changes. One of those pieces I could not bring into line was Unity. We
can’t go through that market process and ask for outside investor
money when there’s something that big that doesn’t have a revenue
story. That’s the pinch we got into.”
Translation: Unity costs a lot of money but doesn’t earn revenue. Gnome DE is Free. Investors will like the change.