Probably more Ubuntu enthusiasts have noticed that Unity, the official Ubuntu flavor that brings back the once-beloved Unity desktop for the first time since gaining official status, has failed to deliver a 25.10 release. Well, there’s a reason for that, and now its maintainers are publicly asking for help.
In a post published yesterday, one of the Ubuntu Unity team members explained that project lead Rudra Saraswat, who’s been at the center of development since the remix’s early days, no longer has time to maintain the project due to university studies.
I’m going to guess, based on the only other comment on this post from @[email protected], that the “beloved” qualifier might be overselling the level of appreciation for Unity. Either it’s not actually that beloved by Ubuntu users or there is only a relatively small number of people for whom Unity truly is beloved. In any case I’m guessing it hasn’t had enough users to justify funding from Canonical.
In fact, just looking up Canonical on Wikipedia to verify the company name and see if they were for-profit I found this:
Just in case it wasn’t clear, Canonical has no interest in funding it anymore. The project was then picked up my community maintainers, which based on the article was just one person who was 12, now ~15 years old. I bring up the age just to point out that, yes, school is a more important thing to focus on.
Oh wow, I thought I read it was university studies (which I’d still say is more important priority-wise), but that’s really young!