Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life
- Reference: 1761769210
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/29/ubuntu_unity_child_maintainer/
- Source link:
Taking to the Ubuntu forums earlier this week, Unity team member Maik Adamietz [1]admitted that things in Unityland aren't faring that great, and for a perfectly good reason that no one can really fault it for. Project leader [2]Rudra Saraswat , who created the Unity Remix project in 2020 to rescue the replaced-by-GNOME [3]interface from obscurity when he was just 10 years old, suddenly has other things on his plate.
Now a teenager, Saraswat is busy with his studies and simply can't dedicate the time to keep Unity operating properly.
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"We can't blame him for that," Adamietz noted in his post. At the end of the day, however, "Unity is broken and needs to be fixed," he added.
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According to Adamietz, Saraswat's busy schedule contributed to Unity, an [7]official Ubuntu flavor since 2022, [8]missing its planned release for Ubuntu 25.10 earlier this month due to the discovery of "critical bugs that prevented us from marking the ISO as ready."
Adamietz noted that the most recent Ubuntu Unity ISOs haven't been tested by humans and have just been automatically generated, meaning that the bugs are piling up as the underlying Ubuntu OS changes.
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"These bugs are also present when you upgrade from 25.04 to 25.10 or try to install the Unity desktop on top of another flavor," Adamietz added. In other words, the project is heading for the lands of well-and-truly-broken abandonware if someone won't step in and help.
Don't look to Adamietz or other members of the Unity project to keep things going, though: He admits he simply doesn't have the skills needed to keep an entire distro moving.
"I nor [Tobiyo Kuujikai, another member of the Unity team] have any technical/developer skills to do this and we both do not know what it takes to be a maintainer," Adamietz said, referring to discussions he'd had recently with Kuujikai about their predicament.
[10]Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray
[11]Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition
[12]Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze
[13]Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached
"I indeed currently don't have the skills and time needed to fix the current bugs in Unity, so also from me the call for help to keep this project going," Kuujikai [14]added in the Ubuntu forums thread.
If you're an Ubuntu enthusiast with the ability to keep Unity operational, now is your time to shine, as the team is seeking help from anyone willing to step in and lend a hand. Per Adamietz, the Unity team is looking for someone who can fix bugs, get the project "back to a workable state as it was with 24.04 and the releases before that," and help the team not miss their planned Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release currently scheduled for April.
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"Maybe someone could teach us how things are done so that we can take it over in time," Adamietz added.
We reached out to Saraswat to see what his plans are for the future of Unity, but didn't immediately hear back. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the [16]precarious [17]position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces. ®
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[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/regarding-ubuntu-unity-and-a-call-for-help/71095
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/04/rudra_sarsawat_ubuntu_projects/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/21/ubuntu_11_04_windows_android_users/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aQKchqnkjdKtgQOODnQ7jQAAAU8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQKchqnkjdKtgQOODnQ7jQAAAU8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2022-September/002670.html
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/ubuntu_2510_is_here/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQKchqnkjdKtgQOODnQ7jQAAAU8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/intel_open_source_commitment/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/16/open_source_maintainers_state_of_open/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/python_foundation_abandons_15m_nsf/
[14] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/regarding-ubuntu-unity-and-a-call-for-help/71095/6
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQKchqnkjdKtgQOODnQ7jQAAAU8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/13/opensource_apacheplc4x_payment/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jailed_code_release/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Obligatory XKCD
[1]That person in Nebraska
[1] https://xkcd.com/2347
Unfortunate that poettering didn't spend more time on studies.
Forced Child Labor in the Linux Mines
And there was precious little financial reward for the abuse as well. I daresay community acclaim simply will not make up for the stunted emotional growth due to lack of socialization. What a horrific admission. Let the bleeding thing die if this is what it takes to resuscitate it.
Re: Forced Child Labor in the Linux Mines
You seriously think that the boy was being forced to do this? And that it *had* to mean he suffered "stunted emotional growth due to lack of socialization"?
Where are you getting your data from? You have proof that *he* needed to spend so many hours on it that he was incapable of finding time to socialise as much as he wanted to? And note that he is changing his own priorities on his time now, which is the whole core of the story, so what evidence do you have that he was being prevented from doing so previously?
As the saying goes "citation needed".
(And, no, saying that *you* feel *you* would be incapable of doing what he did is *not* useful data).
Once you provide data to back up your claims then we can discuss where culpability lies.
How did Canonical do this?
Why is a whole distribution --- not just one program --- being promoted by Canonical as an official flavour of Ubuntu when it depends on a single schoolboy (or even a single adult)? This strikes me as a breach of Duty of Care to him, as well as to the community.
Re: How did Canonical do this?
Because the child concerned [1]put it up for a vote in 2022 and the vote won. When that happened, they listed multiple contributors, and they still have multiple contributors, just multiple contributors not all of which know enough to completely maintain it. Canonical is not responsible for ensuring people who work on external projects are making good decisions no matter whether they link to them or not. However, given the current status, that link might get taken down soon enough if 25.10 can't get released because 25.04 will go out of support in three months.
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuUnity/22.10/Proposal
Time for the big EvilCorp users to chip in
Maybe some of the big companies that make money and use open source should chip in some time and money. I mean Bezos probably spends more on diesel polluting the worlds ocean than it would to keep some of the 30,000 he’s laying off on staff through April release date. It would help smooth their redundancy…
Maybe the Microsoft Azure Linux team could help out? Let’s not forget the Larry Ellison bulletproof Linux team.
Re: Time for the big EvilCorp users to chip in
Those Linux people are working on Linux, the part they use and have the skills with, not keeping an unpopular and not very supported desktop environment compatible with a specific distro. I doubt there is a single company that relies on Unity as a UI layer; while a few people might run it out of preference, they can easily migrate to any of several maintained desktop environments. There is a reason that Canonical stopped developing Unity in 2017 and why the team that picked it up was so small. There's another reason why the most active version of Unity these days is a [1]fork optimized for mobile . We have a hard enough time convincing companies to support the things they do use. You're not going to have any success getting them to support a component they don't use and wouldn't notice if it disappeared.
[1] https://lomiri.com/
Unity drove me to Mint/MATE
I moved from Debian to Ubuntu probably around 2006 on my main laptops(for better hardware compatibility). Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was the last version I used on my systems, since the next LTS had Unity. I went to Mint/MATE and haven't looked back. I never actually tried Unity, but really had no interest in a significant UI change (even now). I have managed to compile one of the most critical bits of my MATE experience, an app called brightside which hasn't seen an upstream release since late 2004 (http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/b/brightside/) even now on Mint 22. Ubuntu 16 I think was the last time they shipped with brightside, which provides edge flipping for virtual desktops in GNOME, something I have used going back to around 1998 (originally with AfterStep). Getting it to build clean on Mint 22 required about 17 other packages to be built from source as well(fortunately all built cleanly based on original source deb files, though I did have to hack a few of them up to build).
Kind of ironic perhaps if Unity as a desktop environment is struggling, when MATE, which maintains a GNOME v1-style(at least, if not more than style) UI is a much older UI than Unity. Thought it was interesting that it seems that Mint 22 ships with pretty much the same version of MATE that Mint 20 did (there is a newer version of MATE too). Not that it matters much to me the version it has works fine, a few bugs here and there that I have long figured out how to workaround/live with.
Are you smarter than a 10 year old?
Now it can be revealed, that TV show was no more than a front, to find 6 to 10 year old children to be forced to work at the typeface.
That last sentence is pretty amazing.
This really is emblematic of much of the more fringe Linux features and options. The maintenance of these things is often the passion project of one or a few exceptionally dedicated individuals. Pretty shocking to hear about a 10 year old leading the effort though.