After completing over 7 years of active development on Unity shell and mobile convergence idea, Mr Mark Shuttleworth, founder of both Ubuntu and Canonical has accepted that, the idea not well accepted in market. Considering the response from market, Canonical has decided to stop investing on Unity8 the phone and convergence shell. Instead, it will be focusing more on cloud and IoT technologies on which Ubuntu is already a key player.
As the Canonical stops working on Unity8, upcoming versions of Ubuntu, beginning from 18.04 LTS will be defaulting to GNOME shell. This will help the project to save enormous amount of energy and time spent to maintain a separate shell for Ubuntu and this resources can be channeled to other market demanding technologies like cloud platforms and IoT (Internet of Things).
At the very beginning, Mark Shuttleworth proposed the idea of convergence, thinking that it would be well appreciated by free software community and industry which faces numerous issues with closed source platforms. "I was wrong on both counts." - he does not hesitate to accept that, the idea was not well convincing for market and community. The community often viewed the efforts Canonical as fragmentation instead of innovation despite of producing a beautiful, usable and solid convergence technology with Unity8.
Mark Shuttleworth has published in a blog post in Ubuntu Insights, announcing the plan to leave idea of convergence by respecting market demands.
As the Canonical stops working on Unity8, upcoming versions of Ubuntu, beginning from 18.04 LTS will be defaulting to GNOME shell. This will help the project to save enormous amount of energy and time spent to maintain a separate shell for Ubuntu and this resources can be channeled to other market demanding technologies like cloud platforms and IoT (Internet of Things).
At the very beginning, Mark Shuttleworth proposed the idea of convergence, thinking that it would be well appreciated by free software community and industry which faces numerous issues with closed source platforms. "I was wrong on both counts." - he does not hesitate to accept that, the idea was not well convincing for market and community. The community often viewed the efforts Canonical as fragmentation instead of innovation despite of producing a beautiful, usable and solid convergence technology with Unity8.
Mark Shuttleworth has published in a blog post in Ubuntu Insights, announcing the plan to leave idea of convergence by respecting market demands.
We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it’s appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. 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.
I’d like to emphasise our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on. We will continue to produce the most usable open source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it.