Fedora, openSUSE Give up on Unity

Some bad news came across the wire today. In a bit of a coincidence, the contributors from both openSUSE and Fedora who were working on Unity announced on the same day they were giving it up. So, those wishing to test this new interface will have to fire up Ubuntu after all.

Adam Williamson, who was porting Unity to Fedora, said in a blog post today that he's has a "hit and miss west coast work ethic." He explained that he has to work on extra things like this in his spare time and lately he's had "little time or inclination for doing much with Unity / Poulsbo." But the actual reason is very closely related to a bug in upstream code. Williamson concedes, "there’s a lot more stuff that’s more important that Red Hat is actually dumb enough to pay me to do."

But he's not the only one. Nelson Marques, who was porting Unity to openSUSE, said he's in danger of suffering burn-out from frustrations with trying to implement Unity. He too cited time constraints as an important factor as well. Marques said, "All the components build so far, the dependencies are all in that repository as well, as I see only integration is required. I’ve runned across some problems, mainly Compiz behavior." Then he also mentioned issues upstreaming saying, "it's maybe wiser to wait for a bit more of development from upstream before looking into this."

Both have left the topic open. Williamson said if anyone wants to help, he'd take it. Marques said if anyone wanted to take over they are welcome to his packages.

So, it appears that if anyone wants to test Unity in the next few months, Ubuntu is going to have to be the one.