14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Dustin Kirkland attended this year's UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu users and developers in Paris, France, where he revealed the results of the Ubuntu desktop survey and the apps that users want to see by default in future Ubuntu releases.
Earlier this year, Canonical put together a survey to find out what users want to see in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and future releases of the popular operating system. The response from users was underwhelming, as more than 15,000 survey responses were recorded from well-known sites like Slashdot, Reddit, or HackerNews.
You can watch the video below if you want to see Dustin Kirkland revealing the results, but we can tell you right now that users want to see Mozilla Firefox as default web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird as default email client, VLC as default video and music player, LibreOffice as default office suite, Gedit as default text editor, and Nautilus as default file manager.
Additionally, Ubuntu users also want to see popular apps like the GNOME Terminal terminal emulator, Evince PDF reader, GIMP image editor, Pidgin multi-protocol instant messenger, GNOME Calendar, Shotwell image viewer, Visual Studio or Eclipse IDE, Kdenlive video editor, and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) screen recorder installed by default.
Future Ubuntu releases could let you to choose your favorite apps
Seeing these amazing feedback, Canonical is currently evaluating which of these apps are suited to be installed by default in future Ubuntu releases, starting with next year's LTS (Long Term Support) release, Ubuntu 18.04. But it also looks like they're deciding if they should implement the ability for users to choose their favorite apps during the installation, which will be a very cool move.
We're also investigating a potential approach to make the Ubuntu Desktop experience perhaps a bit like those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books we loved when we were kids, where users have the opportunity to select each of their prefer applications (or stick with the distro default) for a handful of categories, during installation," reveals Dustin Kirkland in his latest blog post.
All in all, it looks the future of the Ubuntu Desktop is bright, and we can't wait to get our hands on the next major release, Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), coming October 19, 2017, with Linux kernel 4.13 and an all-new desktop experience built on top of the recently released GNOME 3.26 desktop environment to make it easier for Unity users to migrate.
