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UBports announced today that a major milestone in the development of their Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, changing the name of Unity8 to Lomiri.
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.
Second, it was hard for UBports to package Unity8 for other GNU/Linux distributions than Ubuntu, such as Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora, as many of its dependencies contained the ‘ubuntu’ name, which could trigger them to be rejected.
Lastly, it looks like the ‘Unity8’ name was hard to pronounce, and dropping the ‘8’ from ‘Unity’ would create even more confusion. That’s why, starting today, Unity8 is now known as Lomiri.
“It is our pleasure to announce the new name of Unity8 and its related projects: Lomiri! (low-mee-ree),” said UBports. “Lomiri is the operating environment for everywhere: phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop. It features a slick and easy-to-use interface based on the design of its predecessor, Canonical’s Unity desktop environment.”
Lomiri is the future of Ubuntu Touch
What’s not changing it the Ubuntu Touch name, and UBports assures all Ubuntu Phone users that they have nothing to worry about. The Unity8 name wasn’t visible anywhere on the OS, so you won’t notice any change when you’ll update your Ubuntu Phone to the next OTA.
The OpenStore and confined applications will also keep their name, as well as other Ubuntu Touch core components that don’t have ‘ubuntu’ or ‘unity’ in their names.
Lomiri is the future of Ubuntu Touch and we can’t wait to see the awesome new features it will bring with the upcoming OTA-12 software update, which should be out soon with the latest Mir 1.x.
Last updated 4 years ago
