Sad times for users of the Jolicloud operating system and/or desktop environment: support is coming to an end.
Updates to the Jolicloud OS, based on Ubuntu 10.04, and the Jolicloud desktop environment, available for Ubuntu 12.04 and up through a PPA, will be discontinued in December of this year.
The company say that they wish ‘to entirely focus on the web with Jolicloud 2‘.
While no future updates will filter down, users will remain able to use both the OS and the desktop environment in their current states.
Both projects will remain open source and available at jolios.org.
Joli-Well Expected
The news won’t come as too much of a shock to anyone, let alone Jolicloud’s users. The French company recently announced that their web-based content-hub ‘JoliDrive’ – to be rebranded as Jolicloud 2 – now has more than one million users. News that makes the company’s decision to focus its time and energy on its successes a wholly appropriate one.
“JoliDrive is growing to the point where a lot of the actions that used to require an OS no longer do”, Jolicloud’s communications guru Zak Kaufman told me via e-mail.
“Things like file management, music and video playback, can all be done using Jolidrive, available from any web browser on almost every platform”.
Choices
The OS won’t be “officially” discontinued until the end of December, so if you’re using the DE or OS you have a couple of months grace to look at other options.
Migrating to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which will receive maintenance updates until 2017, is one idea. Or, for those keen to continue using a light, web-centric experience just yet is to switch to a Chromebook. Chrome OS offers more features than that of JoliOS or the Jolicloud desktop environment, and the Jolicloud 2 hub can continue to be used.
Before then, if you want a copy of the OS for posterity, or see what the fuss is (soon: was) about check out our previous articles on the desktop environment.