They hope to have a fruitful collaboration with Canonical

Apr 7, 2017 00:40 GMT  ·  By

Christian Schaller, a senior software engineering manager working for Red Hat and a GNOME developer for more than 17 years, wrote a welcoming note to Canonical and Ubuntu.

As you very well know, the entire Linux community was shocked at the recent announcement made by Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth that all development of the Unity 8 user interface and Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system would be ceased, effective immediately, along with the company's Convergence vision to make the Ubuntu OS work the same on mobile and desktop.

For some time now, we've been all very much aware of the fact that Unity 8 doesn't have a future, but probably the only thing that shocked everyone is the fact that Canonical is completely dropping the Unity desktop, announcing that the next LTS (Long Term Support) release of Ubuntu Linux (i.e. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) will be shipping with the GNOME desktop environment.

No details were given yet as to what exactly the "we will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS" means. Users are still asking around on various social networkings if GNOME Shell will be used instead of Unity, and what will happen with the Ubuntu GNOME official flavor. This and many other questions are yet to be answered by Canonical in the coming weeks.

Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams welcome Ubuntu to GNOME and Wayland

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth didn't reveal anything about Ubuntu's development team collaborating with the GNOME devs, but until more details are revealed, it looks like the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams took the first step in welcoming Ubuntu and Canonical to the GNOME and Wayland projects, hoping they'll have a fruitful long-term collaboration for the years to come.

"So as most of you probably know Mark Shuttleworth just announced that they would be switching to GNOME 3 and Wayland again for Ubuntu. So I would like to, on behalf of the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams, welcome them and say that we look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak," said Christian Schaller in his latest blog post.

We don't know about Flatpak, as Canonical won't give up on its Snappy technologies yet, which appear to be quite popular among IoT (Internet of Things) manufacturers, but support for the next-generation Wayland display server could be implemented in the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system along with the GNOME Shell interface. We can't wait to see how things turn out. Ubuntu as a GNU/Linux distribution will still be very popular, even without Unity.