...what? the opportunity?
In a normal company in most places in the developed world being laid off gives you a severance package, while resigning usually doesn't. Not that Canonical is a normal company by any means. The contracts are very bad, almost everyone is some sort of contractor (not an employee); these people most likely would not get anything anyway, just wanted to point out that resigning when you are about to be laid off is a stupid idea.
But that is not what has happened anyway, as the article claims people were axed, they didn't resign.
Also, this has nothing to do with switching to Gnome. Employees were axed for business reasons.
"The Canonical founder is cutting numbers after an external assessment of his company by potential new financial backers found overstaffing and that projects lacked focus."
It may not even have much to do with Mark.
What it looks like to me is that they saw the writing on the wall and knew this external assessment would lead to changes, and took that opportunity to execute a CEO switch plan. The reason behind that switch is perhaps seen above.
Now, many people suggest to go directly to Gnome, but in reality you have many more aditional desktop manager choices on Ubuntu (tried to limit the list to the ones in active development):
- GTK based: Gnome, Pantheon, Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE (Gnome 2 fork), XFCE
- Qt based: KDE, Trinity (KDE 3 fork), LXQt
- NeXT inspired: GNUStep, Window Maker
- Others: Enlightment, CDE.
They all have their tradeoffs.
If you are used to the MS Windows look and feel, maybe Cinnamon/LXQt/Trinity will be the closest.
If you are used to the macOS look and feel, maybe Pantheon or MATE may be closer.
I personally prefer and use Gnome. The Gnome 3 shell is different from everything else (Gnome 2 included), but it was designed trying to minimize distractions. With some tuning (http://extensions.gnome.org) you can adapt it to your needs.
KDE is fine, but most applications I use are GTK based, so I picked a GTK desktop environment.
XFCE is great and performant but hasn't received many updates lately. Development is still active though (https://blog.xfce.org/).
$ ping mods
Maybe update the title to the original one ("Canonical sharpens post-Unity axe for 80-plus Ubuntu spinners") instead of Slashdot's embellished title, too?
Slashdot's title: "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign ..."
Quoting the article: "One individual has resigned ..."
On a side note, I'm kinda surprised to see that Slashdot actually still exists.
[0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/80_canonical_staff_...