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UBports: Unity8 Becomes Lomiri, the Linux Environment for Ubuntu Touch

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 28th of February 2020 01:41:50 AM Filed under

Ubuntu

Unity8 is dead, long live Lomiri! UBports, the maker of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phone devices is unveiling today the new name of the Unity8 project as Lomiri.

Based on Unity8, Lomiri promises to continue the great work left by Canonical and add new features and improvements to provide Linux phone users with a slick and user-friendly interface for their mobile devices.

So why the name change you may ask? Well, according to UBports, there are several reasons for the Unity8 renaming. First, many people were apparently confused about the Unity name, confusing it with the Unity 2D/3D game engine.

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UBPorts Unity8 Convergence Environment Becomes Lomiri

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 28th of February 2020 04:29:29 AM.

UBPorts Unity8 Convergence Environment Becomes Lomiri

Back in April 2017, Canonical decided to refocus Ubuntu development for the Cloud and IoT, dropping their mobile/desktop convergence efforts. So Unity8 environment was dropped in favor of GNOME desktop environment, which to this date is still used in recent versions of Ubuntu Desktop operating system.

As a reminder, Unity8 was both suitable for desktop PCs, as well as smartphones and tablets through Ubuntu Touch. But at the time, it was working fairly well, even found in devices such as BQ Aquaris M10 tablets. Since the code was open source, UBPorts developer community was formed and a few months later they released their first image for supported phones such as OnePlus One, FairPhone 2, or Optimus L90.

Ubuntu Touch Mobile OS Drops “8” From Its Desktop Environment

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 28th of February 2020 07:06:10 PM.

Ubuntu Touch Mobile OS Drops “8” From Its Desktop Environment Unity8

The market for Linux-based mobile operating systems isn’t that crowded; UBports is one of the stakeholders in the same market that develops and takes care of Ubuntu-based OS, Ubuntu Touch, for smartphones.

Slowly but surely, Ubuntu Touch is gaining popularity with more platform support. Hence, the UBPorts team discussed their name clash of the “Unity8” desktop environment with the most popular game engine brand “Unity.” As a result, UBPorts renamed “Unit8” to “Lomiri.”

Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 28th of February 2020 07:07:58 PM.

Unity 8 Desktop Renamed To Lomiri

The Unity 8 desktop environment that continues to be developed by the UBports open-source community for use on UBports' Ubuntu Touch and ultimately back on the Linux desktop as well have renamed the project.

The Unity 8 environment was renamed to Lomiri. Renaming Unity 8 was done to avoid confusion with the Unity Tech 2D/3D game engine leading to confused users on both sides. The other issue was with Unity 8 being packaged up for other Linux distributions like Debian and Fedora, some packagers didn't want "ubuntu" appearing in any package strings for different Unity 8 dependencies.

So to avoid confusion, the UBports team decided to rename Unity 8 to Lomiri, pronounced as low-mee-ree.

Lomiri: Ubuntu for smartphones gets a new desktop environment

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 28th of February 2020 07:10:12 PM.

Lomiri: Ubuntu for smartphones gets a new desktop environment (Unity8 rebranded)

When Canonical abandoned its Ubuntu for smartphones project, an independent group of developers called called UBPorts picked up the pieces of open source code and carried on.

Over the last few years, the UBPorts version of Ubuntu Touch has started to diverge from the OS Canonical left behind by adding support for new devices and features.

Mike Gabriel: Lomiri - Operating Environment for Everywhere

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 29th of February 2020 03:23:50 AM.

Mike Gabriel: Lomiri - Operating Environment for Everywhere

I was honoured to witness the process of the long outstanding name change +/- in real time over the last couple of days / weeks. I was touched by the gentleness of the discussion and the weighing of pros and cons, this name and that name; also by the jokes being injected into the discussions.

Dalton Durst, release manager on the UBports [2] team, explains in depth [1] about the reasoning and necessities behind the name change. Please (esp. if you feel sad or irritated by the name change), read the official announcement and detailled explanation. If you need time to adjust, Dalton's explanations will help.

Remember Unity8 from Ubuntu? UBports is Renaming it to Lomiri

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 29th of February 2020 06:02:47 PM.

Remember Unity8 from Ubuntu? UBports is Renaming it to Lomiri

Ever since Ubuntu abandoned the Unity project, UBports continued the maintenance and development of Unity. On February 27th 2020, UBports announced that they are giving Unity8 a new branding in the form of Lomiri.UBports announced that the Unity8 desktop environment would be renamed as Lomiri. They gave three reasons for this fairly drastic announcement.

First, they want to avoid confusion with the Unity game engine. Quite a few people confused the two. UBports noted that they are frequently receiving questions regarding “how to import 3D models and meshes into our shell”. When you search “Unity” in your favorite search

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