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The Ubuntu GNOME distros blog post tells you everything you need to know:
There will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu. The development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging resources and focusing on a single combined release... We are currently liaising with the Canonical teams on how this will work out.
Old hands in this field may recall a similar refocusing happened to Red Hat back in 2003. Red Hat dropped its desktop, then called Red Hat Linux, and started up Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in the process becoming the boring enterprise-focused company it is today. But it created the community based Fedora to serve as what Red Hat Linux had once been so not all was lost.
While this is the likely script for Canonical over the next few years, it is equally possible that it may not actually go this way. Canonical may stick with its desktop and still make it a major focus of its development because while the money is in enterprise, what made Ubuntu very nearly a household name is not enterprise, but community.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Saturday May 06 2017, @06:16AM
Better still, a lot of the work has already been done for them. Not long after posting my comment, I found out that there's already a Unity look-and-feel theme for Plasma 5 [omgubuntu.co.uk] that covers a lot of the remaining ground I mentioned in the above comment, at least with regard to the theming.
Ugh, don't remind me. GNOME devs don't seem to give a damn about what they break unless it's not something they use. It's not just about gnome-shell extensions, either; gtk3 managed a regression from gtk2 that made it pretty damn busted for tablet users (in the "wacom", not "android", sense) and nobody gave a fuck for months. At least it didn't get closed NOTABUG WONTFIX like normal, I guess...
While not originally created as such, it's long been the case that "gtk" really means "GNOME toolkit" simply due to the amount of developer overlap, so it evolves to the needs of GNOME, not gtk users. Probably why art programs are using Qt more and gtk less now, with the big exceptions (Inkscape and Gimp) stil being on Gtk2. The only Gtk3 app of the kind I can think of is MyPaint, which had a really painful transition to Gtk3 because of shit like above.
I always got the impression it was mostly inertia, at least with established distros. The only reason GNOME was created was to be an ideological fuck-you to Qt's original licensing. Someone is making something but we don't like the license! We better make a shittier GPL version ASAP! That was enough to get it into distros as default for a while, and by the time the Qt licensing improved, inertia had set in.
But for something like Ubuntu phasing out Unity, it just makes no damn sense. The licensing is no longer an issue and GNOME is anathema to the sort of customisation that would be beneficial in the transition.
Furthermore, KDE does an excellent job of doing cross-toolkit integration; the devs have long pushed for a more seamless experience there, and have generally been the ones doing the work to create equivalent look-and-feel across multiple toolkits, while GNOME devs were content to let non-GNOME apps look like second-class citizens. It's the sort of polish that would be good for the default Ubuntu.
Oh, and I should have mentioned kwin before. It's not directly related to compiz (which Unity still uses long after the project basically died), but a lot of compiz ideas live on in kwin's compositing effects design. You can configure how much (or little) bling you want by enabling effect plugins, many of which were blatantly copied from compiz. It even has that dumb 3d cube that is mostly pointless but sometimes fun to show to people. :)
That might actually be related. There's been a long-running trend of an increasing number of developers owning (and using) Apple systems, to the point that many don't even run Linux directly on the hardware, preferring to use Linux via VM. For example, Miguel de Icaza, GNOME's creator* abandoned Linux for OS X years ago, and he's not the only one. This most likely leads to two separate things happening:
It doesn't help that GNOME's been on this "fuck you, we know better" trajectory since GNOME 2 was released ages ago. I know it's remembered fondly by people, but GNOME 2 was a huge step backward for user flexibility when it came out, much like how GNOME 3 was one from GNOME 2. It's only remembered well now because of all the work people did to work around its brain damage and loss of features by adding extensions. GNOME 3's decisions are another iteration of this cycle, bolstered by Apple's surging popularity.
* Also the creator of the Mono project, and now a Microsoft employee due to the sale of his company, Xamarin, to Microsoft.