14 DAY TRIAL // The following may sound like a late April Fools' prank, but it looks like Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth just announced a few minutes ago that the company would stop developing the Unity 8 interface, and terminate its convergence plans.
If memory recalls, last year during an Ubuntu Online Summit event, Mark Shuttleworth said that a small team of Ubuntu developers would develop and test the upcoming Unity 8 desktop environment for desktop, and if they find it as reliable as Unity 7 is these days, then, and only then, it will become the default for future Ubuntu Linux releases.
During these last months, Unity 8 wasn't received very well by the Ubuntu community, and its media coverage was almost non-existent. Personally, I could not even try the Unity 8 session that's available as a preview on the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) release on any of my computers. However, Unity 8 showed to be quite innovative on the Ubuntu Phone/Tablet devices.
But things don't always go as they're planned, and it now looks like Canonical will stop investing in Unity 8, as well as the Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Convergence. "I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," said Mark Shuttleworth in today's announcement.
Going back to the roots
Yes, you're reading it right, and we're as shocked as you are. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the next long-term support release of the popular Ubuntu operating system is shipping with the GNOME desktop environment instead of Unity 7. It's true that Unity 7, which is based on the GNOME Stack, was always a step or two behind the development of the GNOME desktop, and it always offered users a very old Nautilus file manager.
Things have changed in this regard now, and the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system will contain many of the components from the recently released GNOME 3.24 Stack, though Nautilus is still kept at the 3.20.x branch due to the obvious incompatibilities with the Ubunty 7 desktop. The switch to the GNOME desktop could be made right after the release of Ubuntu 17.04 on April 13, 2017.
Unity 8 and the Ubuntu Convergence vision are no longer the future of computing that Canonical and Ubuntu founder once thought it was. "I was wrong on both counts," reveals Mark Shuttleworth. "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."
From here onwards, Canonical will concentrate their efforts on cloud (OpenStack, LXD, Kubernetes, Juju, MAAS, BootStack) and IoT (Internet of Things), as Ubuntu Linux appears to be the most used operating system on both private and public cloud infrastructures. The Snappy technologies will also be developed, for now, as they have a strong community and bring revenue to Canonical's doorsteps.