In a surprising blog post dated earlier today, the company behind the popular Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system announced that it was abandoning the idea of 'convergence' between desktop, mobile, and other platforms. and would return to using the traditional Gnome desktop environment in their 18.04 release instead of their own interface, Unity. The company first debuted Unity in 2010 when it announced its desire to have a more unified and modern user interface that worked well on various platforms including phones.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project had this to say in the post regarding the companies push towards the mobile space and, what many believe, the de-emphasizing of the desktop experience:
"“I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts,” he writes.
“In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility, instead taking a ‘better the devil you know’ approach to those form factors, or investing in home-grown platforms. What the Unity8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear.”
“The choice, ultimately,” he concludes, “is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company. Those are Ubuntu itself, for desktops, servers and VMs, our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kubernetes) our cloud operations capabilities (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), and our IoT story in snaps and Ubuntu Core.”
Right now, all we know is that Gnome is set to return to Ubuntu with the 18.04 release but other details are still sketchy. I'll post more as the company clarifies their intentions and decisions.