A long time after investing thousands of dollars, Canonical is giving up on its Unity project and Ubuntu for phones. The company has decided to switch Ubuntu desktops back to GNOME from next year and shift its focus more towards the cloud.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be the first open source version by Canonical to by default support GNOME. This new version will be debuted in April 2018. Likewise, the company has announced the discounted support for Ubuntu for phones and tablets.
“We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, in a blog post. “The choice, ultimately, is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company.”
End of life for convergence
With the latest development, the concept of convergence that was designed to bring a desktop-alike experience through mobile devices will leave the world. The desktop development will, however, continue to happen with upstream designs and developments.
Ubuntu’s specific version for phones and tablets failed to achieve popularity among manufacturers, carriers and consumers. Likewise, Unity 8 on phones was never stable enough to make it to desktops.
In the coming future, Canonical will be forced to use the Wayland display server to switch to GNOME. This will be the only official way to remove the Unity’s presence from an Ubuntu system.
[…] 17.10 will be shipped with GNOME 3.26 by default. The release cycle will be same as any other major Ubuntu versions. Notably, Canonical […]