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: 2) by Zyx Abacab on Saturday May 06 2017, @07:44PM
They have done more to put linux on the desktop than anybody else. They are far from perfect, but nobody else is delivering.
I'm with you right here. I've been using all kinds of Linuxes since the early 2000s, and today I use Ubuntu.
It was fun, at first, to fuck around with configuration files, but messing with these things gets tiresome fast. It's nice that alternatives exist—and distros like Gentoo make for a wonderful learning experience—but most of those really suck for getting work done.
If you're looking for a good desktop experience, there are only a couple of reasonable choices; and I've found that Ubuntu is the best one for non-enterprise use.