: Team begs for help as teenage dev who revived Canonical’s old Unity desktop prioritizes studies

The Ubuntu Unity project is in trouble because its maintainer, a Linux whiz kid, has had less time to work on it due to his studies. Now other team members are appealing to the wider Ubuntu community for help.

Taking to the Ubuntu forums earlier this week, Unity team member Maik Adamietz admitted that things in Unityland aren’t faring that great, and for a perfectly good reason that no one can really fault it for. Project leader Rudra Saraswat, who created the Unity Remix project in 2020 to rescue the replaced-by-GNOME interface from obscurity when he was just 10 years old, suddenly has other things on his plate.

Now a teenager, Saraswat is busy with his studies and simply can’t dedicate the time to keep Unity operating properly.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    8·
    3 days ago

    I don’t fear for my career because of AI. I fear my career because of kids like this one.

    Kudos to him! I definitely couldn’t maintain something so big and complex at 10. Heck, not sure I’d be able to pull it off now!

  • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
    17·
    4 days ago

    Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces

    What a terrible takeaway. I’d rather say that the takeaway is that all things come to an end, even Unity 7 which it’s honestly incredible didn’t die ages ago.

    Those interested in keeping on working on Unity should perhaps focus their efforts instead on Lomiri, the community continuation of Unity 8 and default environment in Ubuntu Touch.

    Here’s a demonstration from two months ago, running desktop apps like Librewolf on an external monitor powered by Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4. It is of course not limited to Ubuntu Touch; Ubuntu Touch is just the only distro where it’s the default interface.