Fedora Moving to Unity Too!

Despite all the negative reaction to Ubuntu's move to Unity, is it possible that another popular distribution is going to walk in its footsteps? Do they want to experience the backlash and exodus of users? Do they want to be subjected to a barrage of criticism? Well, no, not really. But Adam Williamson is working on making some Fedora packages for those that might want to test and run it.

In a blog post today Williamson announced that he's going to give it the ole college try. But according to him, it's going to be quite the undertaking. He said, "I'm just started at the bottom of the dependency pile and seeing how far I can get. So far, I have review requests in for libindicator and dee. I need to do nux, and after libindicator goes in, the actual indicators. The remaining dependencies are a bit trickier." And that's just the beginning.

But perhaps a better topic is "Why?" Williamson says there are a few reasons. He said, "Mainly, Unity's an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too." He added Fedora packages seem preferable to installing Ubuntu.

Another reason Williamson gives is it will keep Unity developers honest. Specificially, he said, "if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes."

Finally, he thought he might help motivate upstream projects to work with the Unity developers. If other distributions are interested, the upstream developers will want to make sure their code is easy to maintain across distributions.

Right now, the early work is just getting started and packages may not compile or run properly at all. But if anyone can do it, it's probably Williamson.