If I remember correctly Unity was a fork of Gnome with lots of patches applied to the point of having both Gnome and Unity on the same system taking effort and being risky w.r.t. stability.

My guess is that they've invested entire Unity vNext on Mir, and if they're dropping Mir, they'll might as well drop Unity 8. That leaves them with Unity 7, and to unfuck a decade worth of changes they've done to make it work with mainline Gnome source.

Basically lots of work to have a 6 year old product back to square one, before they can, once again, attempt to further develop it.

I'm guessing they've decided that's not worth the effort and that their time is better spent helping improve something already mature (Gnome 3).

Touché, but they could have listened to the community back when they announced Mir and Unity 8 too ;)

They reduced the number of patches quite a bit. For some of the things they do, they depend on components that are not commonly used within GNOME. Meaning, it's not a patch, but as a sole user they'll have to maintain components if they're the only "user". Something written on top of Tracker IIRC; not started by Canonical, but nicely used by them. That's always a bit of a difficult explanation, sometimes Canonical expects maintenance to happen magically.

Unity 7 is a computer plugin.

I hope they are dropping Unity 8 in the sense they are dropping Unity 8 over MIR and are going to develop Unity over Wayland. Because seriously, Unity is nowadays the most usable of the Linux desktops.

>Because seriously, Unity is nowadays the most usable of the Linux desktops.

Oh yes. I tried all the DEs and it's by far the most pretty. I use Numix themes and it's so great. I love my pastel colored, flat icons, with brutalist window edges.

It pretty much went the other way, ubuntu is dropping mir because they dropt unity8

edit: unity8 seems to be thightly coupled to mir, although there seems to be a fork in the works to port unity8 to wayland

Sorry for the loss. Honestly.

I for one however had a really strong dislike for the alt-tab behaviour as well as the shared menu.

This is possibly configurable, I don't know and didn't care. In GNOME, this is configurable behaviour. I liked this default and kept me on Unity because of that.

This comes down to personal workflows. I got very frustrated dealing with the alt-tab behaviour of only showing windows when my focus is what application I need to use when I do the alt-tab. This is also the one holdover from using OS X daily, the one feature I felt was right (really, for me and probably a lot of people.)