14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is preparing to drop the GNOME Control Center in favor of a temporary fork called Unity Control Center.
Despite its being called Unity, the desktop environment made by Canonical and used in all its distros in the past few years, still relies on GNOME. The developers have forked a lot of packages and have patched others, but some of them will be replaced in the near future.
“Ubuntu makes use of a heavily patched gnome-control-center (61 patches) and we will in future move to the new Ubuntu System Settings once we achieve convergence.”
“We are already running an old version of gnome-control-center (3.6) and the value for Ubuntu in upgrading this is low since it would take a lot of work to update our changes. Running an old version until convergence blocks those who do use GNOME (i.e. Ubuntu GNOME),” said Canonical's Robert Ancell.
Their plan is quite simple. The latest version they’re using, which is based on GNOME Control Center 3.6, will be replaced, at least temporarily, by a fork called Unity Control Center.
The final goal is to have something completely different, which will be consistent with type of Control Center present in Ubuntu Touch.
“To be very clear, this is a fork with a limited lifespan. We don't expect to make significant changes to it outside of stability and security fixes. This change affects a number of packages, and I have attempted to find and fix all the side-effects,” also said Robert Ancell.
A couple of links have been provided for the two packages, Ubuntu Touch System Settings and Unity Control Center, but the latter is not working yet.
In any case, it's likely that Ubuntu 14.04 might only feature the Unity Control Center and not the final version, but there is still a long time until then.