Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 5 April 2017 at 01:23 PM EDT. 286 Comments
UBUNTU
Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04.

Presumably this also means the end of Mir development too, with GNOME focusing on Wayland. Additionally, Ubuntu is ending development of their phone and convergence initiatives. Shuttleworth wrote today, "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."

In place of focusing on Unity and convergence and phones, Ubuntu will double-down on their cloud and IoT initiatives.

More details via this blog post. Quite a surprise! More details to come.

Update: Find more thoughts in A Look Back At The Desktop & X.Org/Wayland/Mir Milestones Of Ubuntu.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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