Ubuntu 18 to use GNOME as the default Desktop Environment
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will use GNOME as the default desktop Environment and also they will end of their investment in Unity 8.
In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical wrote:
We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it’s appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
So it looks like Ubuntu 17 will be the last to use Unity interface as it’s default desktop.
GNOME Desktop
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a Linux operating system.
GNOME desktop (GNU Network Object Model Environment) was created by Miguel de Icaza in 1997 and first released in 1999. Best known for its simplicity and has been chosen as the default desktop environment in many popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora and Debian.