With the death of Unity, Canonical will focus more attention on Ubuntu servers, Ubuntu in the cloud and Ubuntu in the so-called Internet of Things.
Even if you give Canonical the benefit of the doubt - that it will continue working on desktop Ubuntu - at the very least, desktop Ubuntu's future looks uncertain.
Post Unity, how will the transition to GNOME work? Will existing Unity users be "upgraded" to GNOME with 17.10? Canonical is reportedly plotting out solutions to much of this uncertainty right now, but for users, the uncertainty rules the day.
As I've already argued, Canonical appears to be following in the footsteps of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. In 2003, Red Hat dropped its desktop, then called Red Hat Linux, and started up Red Hat Enterprise Linux, eventually becoming the enterprise-focused company it is today. Something similar happened to SUSE, though the process was different. Novell bought SUSE in 2003 and immediately rebranded it SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
I believe Canonical will follow in the footsteps of Red Hat and SuSE. But there's an upside: out of Red Hat came Fedora and out SuSE came openSUSE. In the end, for Linux distros, community matters. Enterprise customers may pay the bills but without community Linux distros seem to fade away into the ether.
In light of that, it's worth taking a look at where the various distros are, what their plans for the future are and why you might prefer them over Ubuntu.
In addition to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, elementary OS, and Arch are discussed.
(Score: 2) by BK on Friday May 26 2017, @09:13PM (3 children)
Si if it's derailed, surely you can point to something that is both 'on track' and worthy of recommendation...? Or to put it another way, how best should the masses now install linux?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 27 2017, @12:02AM (1 child)
If Distrowatch's "page hit ranking" is anything to go by, interest in Ubuntu and its variants, especially Mint, is still strong. Linux Mint emphasises ease of use. Apart from those, Debian, Manjaro and openSUSE (in that order) are attracting a lot of page hits.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday May 27 2017, @06:37PM
And there's Devuan, which is free of systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @06:34AM
https://neon.kde.org/ [kde.org] is trying to.