After quite a few unexciting releases, Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” is full of huge changes. Ubuntu Phone is dead, and so is Ubuntu’s dream of a converged desktop. Ubuntu’s developers are no longer working on Unity 8, and Ubuntu 17.10 ditches the old Unity 7 desktop for GNOME Shell.
Ubuntu Phone, Unity 8, Mir, and Convergence Are Dead
It’s impossible to understand why Ubuntu is so different now without looking at what happened with Ubuntu Phone. On April 5, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth wrote that Ubuntu would stop investing time into Ubuntu Phone, the vision of convergence, and the new Unity 8 desktop that was supposed to replace the existing Unity 7 desktop in the future. Instead, Ubuntu would invest more in the cloud and Internet of Things markets, where it’s a successful platform many companies build on.
This is a huge deal. For many releases, the existing Unity 7 desktop has been largely left alone. Instead, the developers spent a lot of time polishing up the Unity 8 desktop, which was designed to run on desktop PCs, phones, TVs, and everything in between. Ubuntu created its own Mir display server to replace the existing Xorg server, and a lot of work was done on that, too. Ubuntu developers also spent a lot of time on Ubuntu Phone. But Unity 8 and Mir never arrived in stable form on the desktop, and I personally found them very unstable and unpolished on the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet. All that work has now been abandoned.
Instead of pursuing a vision of convergence, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical would shift back to the GNOME desktop and include that with the Ubuntu 18.
04 LTS release. The current 17.10 is the last stable release before the 18.04 long-term-support release, so Ubuntu is making the shift now so the new desktop environment can be stabilized, tested, and polished.Basically, instead of trying to go its own way and develop its own desktop, display server, and platform, Ubuntu is re-embracing its roots as a Linux distribution and using the desktop software developed along with the larger Linux community. The first releases of Ubuntu used GNOME before Unity was developed, and Ubuntu is now using GNOME once again.
These changes aren’t necessarily bad. While Ubuntu fans who were looking forward to Ubuntu phones and a converged desktop surely aren’t thrilled, many people are happy to see Ubuntu refocusing on providing a stable desktop and working with the larger Linux community. Ubuntu desktop users should get a more polished desktop that improves faster. Of course, it stings if you believed in the Ubuntu…
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