Canonical made announcement today that it’s planning to do away with its Unity Desktop starting with the Ubuntu 18.04 release. Don’t worry, Canonical is not doing away with its own Linux Desktop. This means they are not going to develop anymore of its Unity Desktop environment. The Ubuntu desktop will be switching back to the Gnome desktop, which was its default desktop environment before going with Unity six years ago.

In addition, Canonical will also end its support for Unity8 which was targeted phones and tablets. Unity8 was meant to converge the desktop with phones and tablets. As far as the desktop, Canonical dominated the Linux desktop years ago according to Distrowatch.com. I think going with Unity pushed some users to switch over to other distros such as Linux Mint. I was one of them.

Despite the tumbles Canonical has made on the desktop, the Ubuntu Server is still a big hit on the cloud.