Ubuntu 18.04 will have Gnome as a default desktop, not Unity

In a blog post by Mark Shuttleworth named "Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence", he made it clear that Unity would no longer be the defacto, or default desktop.

"I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity 8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS."

He goes on to say though that Canonical is NOT going to abandon Unity. They just will no longer spend their time improving it. It will still be in the repos, and that he is sure that the community that enjoys Unity will continue to support it.

The reason he gave for the switch back to familiar Gnome country was the fact that the majority of the Linux community didn't see Unity as innovation, but simply fragmentation of yet another forked project.

"In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility, instead taking a ‘better the devil you know’ approach to those form factors, or investing in home-grown platforms."

I think I see his point. Gnome has been so universally adopted by major distributions, that moving back to Gnome 3 and focusing on polishing other avenues of Ubuntu, like the snap system, are a win win in his book.

To me their will be little change. I am still an ardent XFCE fan, and as such, am still using Xubuntu.
Gnome 3 and Unity both have always felt so heavy on resources, but that's a discussion for another time.

-Denny