The circle is complete at Canonical. After six years and ten months, Ubuntu will abandon the Unity interface to return to GNOME. The decision was announced by company founder Mark Shuttleworth, and the transition is expected to conclude with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in 2018. The retirement of Unity also marks the end of the road for the Mir display server, and all plans for "convergence" on mobile devices.
The arrival of the Unity interface to Ubuntu was undoubtedly one of the most complex moments for the operating system. The community was blunt, and a good part of users took their relationship with Linux distros elsewhere, adopting solutions like Linux Mint, or variants of Ubuntu itself (Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, etc.). Despite the criticism and constant friction during its development, everything seemed ready for Unity 8 to finally take its place on the desktop, but through an official message, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, confirmed its cancellation. At the same time, all work on "convergence" on mobile devices and its Mir graphics server would be shelved.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/QZ05o0RPwUQBasically, Shuttleworth admitted that the decision is a response to the commercial challenges facing the company. Ubuntu remains strong on desktops and is experiencing healthy growth in servers, virtualization, cloud services, and the Internet of Things. On the other hand, Ubuntu's presence on mobile devices never gained the expected traction, and Shuttleworth acknowledged that Unity 8 was not being seen by the community as something innovative, but rather contributing to fragmentation. Canonical will take a year to organize its return to GNOME 3, and will conclude with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in April 2018.
From what I've seen so far, this "return to its roots" was well received. The general sentiment was that Canonical duplicated efforts unnecessarily, and that it always showed greater strength in optimizing existing open source projects. Obviously, the user never lost the ability to choose an interface in Linux distros (and never will), but there are times when less is more, and Canonical believes it's time to adopt that vision.
