14 DAY TRIAL // A lot is happening in the Ubuntu world these days after Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth shocked the entire Linux community when he announced that the Unity 8 user interface would no longer be developed.
Unity 8 was Canonical's latest vision for the future of the Ubuntu desktop, along with convergence. It was supposed to give Ubuntu a bump by acting the same on both mobile and PCs, something that no other GNU/Linux distribution does, at least not at the moment of writing this article.
But it turned out its development process was slowed down by various factors, including that the Ubuntu community was not really interested in that fancy look and feel of Unity 8 on the desktop. It was fine on mobile, but the desktop feeling was not so good, not to mention that it didn't work on some hardware.
Long story short, the decision made by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was to completely drop support for the Unity interface as default desktop environment on Ubuntu, and this is more shocking than the Unity 8 development being terminated. As such, starting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, GNOME will become default desktop.
Of course, most of you already knew that, but what you probably didn't know was that Mark Shuttleworth decided to switch to Ubuntu GNOME as default flavor, which answers the big question everyone was asking lately: "What will happen to the Ubuntu GNOME flavor now that Ubuntu is switching to the GNOME desktop?"
"Canonical desktop team will help the Ubuntu GNOME team deliver an amazing GNOME experience," says Mark Shuttleworth on Google+. "We're helping the Ubuntu GNOME team, not creating something different or competitive with that effort. While I am passionate about the design ideas in Unity [...] I think we should respect the GNOME design leadership by delivering GNOME the way GNOME wants it delivered."
Unity 7 interface to be installable from the Ubuntu repositories
Another question that was on everyone's lips these days was: "What will happen to the Unity 7 interface? Will it disappear forever?" We were also curious to know the answer to that question, and Mark Shuttleworth calmed everyone down by announcing that the Unity 7 packages would be installable from the repositories.
It won't be default, though, of course, which means that you'll need to manually install them using a tool like Synaptic Package Manager, but it won't be hard and you'll still be able to enjoy your beloved Unity 7 user interface even on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, due for release next year on April.
The even greater news that many Unity 7 fans probably would like to hear right now is that the interface will continue to be maintained by a small team over at Canonical, though we don't know yet if new features will be added in the long run.
Probably not, and you should expect it to go away someday, unfortunately, if Canonical decided to stay with GNOME. Until then, we can't wait to enjoy the Ubuntu 17.04, launching in only three days from today, and Ubuntu 17.10 releases, both shipping with the Unity 7 desktop environment by default.