How would you feel if the Ubuntu distribution had Gnome as the default desktop instead of Unity? Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth shocked the entire Ubuntu community with an announcement when he said that the development of Unity 8 would not proceed.
Unity 8 was Canonical's vision for the future of the Ubuntu desktop. Unity 8 could be used on mobile and desktop, something no other GNU/Linux interface can do, at least not yet.
However, it turned out that the development process of Unity 8 was slowed down by several factors. One of them was that while the new DE looked great on mobile devices, it didn't feel so good on desktop computers, not to mention that it didn't work at all on some hardware.
So Mark Shuttleworth decided to completely stop development of Unity, ending support for it as the default desktop environment for Ubuntu. This is certainly more shocking than the end of development of Unity 8.
What does this mean?
With the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the distribution will ship with the GNOME desktop as the default.
“The Canonical team will help the Ubuntu GNOME team deliver an amazing GNOME experience,” Mark Shuttleworth said on Google+.
What will happen to the default Unity 7 environment?
Mark Shuttleworth reports that Unity 7 packages will be able to be installed from the distribution's repositories.
However, it won't be installed by default, as we've known it until now. This means if you like and want Unity, you'll have to install it manually using a tool like Synaptic Package Manager.
Let us mention once again that the above changes will come with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, which will be released next April.
