It has been a little while since we shared our vision for Ubuntu Desktop, and explained how our current roadmap fits into our long term strategic thinking. Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re going.
These values form the framework by which we determine our priorities and measure our progress, and hopefully inspire those that want to contribute to this experience to focus their energies in ways that are aligned with our longer term ambitions.
I was hoping for more concrete ideas, plans, and ambitions from Canonical here, but this one is a bit of a nothingburger. There’s a lot happening in the desktop Linux world, especially around immutability, and I see nothing here about such long-term plans, or even relatively short-term meaningful desktop improvements.
I feel Ubuntu are just letting themselves slip away on the desktop. They have about a quarter of the Linux desktop market and have made it abundantly clear that desktop isn’t their focus anymore (that’s not the same as not building a desktop, but it’s not their focus). This article has done nothing to dissuade me from that sentiment. They have basically set out some high level generic themes that are broadly self evident without specifics. I genuinely struggle to think of the last desktop improvement to come out of Ubuntu (as opposed to incorporate improvements from other projects like gnome). Mer,
“There’s a lot happening in the desktop Linux world, especially around immutability, and I see nothing here about such long-term plans […]”
TBF, there is a mention of Ubuntu Core (the immutable version of Ubuntu Desktop) in the final section:
“Ubuntu 23.10: In parallel we are also working on Ubuntu Core Desktop, an immutable version of the classic desktop experience, an additional choice for Linux Desktop users designed to improve security, quality and stability.”