Ubuntu to stick a fork in Gnome Control Centre
By Andrew Powell, published 15/12/2013 in News
In a move that will no doubt be unsurprising for anyone that has followed Canonical's moves with Ubuntu over the last few years, it has been confirmed that the Gnome Control Centre will indeed be forked into the "Unity Control Centre" for the popular Linux based operating system.
Ubuntu has been increasingly moving away from relying on GNOME 3 components for some time, but the Unity desktop has still been heavily based off the Gnome desktop. The problem from Canonical's perspective has been that the GNOME team has been moving very fast in development and in particular, upgrading to newer versions of the Gnome Control Centre would prove a lot of work for the Ubuntu Unity team, for little gain.
As confirmed by Robert Ancell on an Ubuntu mailing list, Ubuntu already makes use of some 61 patches to the Gnome Control Centre in order to integrate it into Unity and add functionality that they desire and as was mentioned above, the easiest solution to the Ubuntu team was to fork the existing already-patched Gnome Control Centre (version 3.6).
It is however stressed that this is a temporary solution until Ubuntu moves to the new "Ubuntu System Settings", which is currently the system settings application for Ubuntu Touch but will be a part of the Ubuntu desktop once "it achieves convergence".
The other reason noted for this move is that while simply keeping the old version of the Gnome Control Centre would work fine for Ubuntu Unity, until the aforementioned "convergence" is achieved, it would cause problems for those running an up-to-date Gnome desktop, which would then of course cause problems for the Ubuntu GNOME spinoff. So as to keep things running smoothly and most importantly keep everyone (using GNOME) in a good mood, a fork with even a limited lifespan was the answer.
It's also mentioned by Robert that a gnome-settings-daemon fork is available, for the same reasons as above.
All in all, it seems Ubuntu Unity is getting much closer to being it's own fully self-contained desktop environment, much like the Cinnamon desktop achieved recently.