Canonical discontinues Unity, Convergence and Ubuntu for smartphones

Canonical will stop investing in desktop interface Unity, the amalgamation of desktop and mobile under the name Convergence and Ubuntu for smartphones. Instead, the organization focuses on Gnome and Ubuntu for cloud services and the Internet of Things.

As of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Canonical will again ship the operating system with Gnome instead of Unity’s desktop interface, says founder Mark Shuttleworth. “What the Unity8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, useful and solid, but I respect that markets and the community ultimately decided which products grow and which disappear.”

Turning to Ubuntu for smartphones and Convergence, the system for using a smartphone as a desktop, Shuttleworth says he had counted on the free software community and the tech industry both to be interested in an open source alternative to closed systems. large tech companies. “I was wrong on both counts. In the community, people saw our efforts as fragmentation and not innovation. And the industry didn’t rally around this opportunity, instead taking an approach along the lines of ‘rather the devil die’. you know’, or they invested in their own platforms.”

Shuttleworth says it was a “tough decision” to part with Unity8, Convergence and the smartphone project. Ubuntu for smartphones ran on devices from the Spanish bq and the Chinese Meizu, but major brands have never supported it.

Canonical will focus on Ubuntu’s cloud services products such as Openstack, Kubernetes, MAAS, LXD, Juju and BootStack. In addition, it focuses on the internet-of-things, where it believes that it has strong trump cards with ‘snaps’ and Ubuntu Core.

Replay: Ubuntu Convergence video