Canonical Ltd. has finally admitted defeat in its long-running quest to deliver a converged Ubuntu Linux experience that runs on both desktops and smartphones.

For more than six years, Canonical, which develops the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system distribution, has been trying to sell the idea of convergence – which means, more or less, the same version of its OS running on desktop, mobile, servers and the cloud. Key to that vision was the company’s Unity desktop environment, which was first introduced in 2010.

Now, Canonical has made the surprising announcement it’s going to kill off Unity for good. “I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell,” Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth wrote on the official Ubuntu blog Wednesday. “We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.”

Shuttleworth said Canonical made its decision following a new-fiscal-year evaluation of the company’s projects. Unfortunately for Unity and its fans, the company has decided it doesn’t have any future.

The decision came as such a huge shock to developers that the Ubuntu blog was briefly taken offline by a massive surge in traffic.

In his blog post, Shuttleworth reflected on what Unity had set out to achieve: “Unity 8 delivers a unified set of experiences across all the kinds of personal computers. I care about developers – I need to give them a Linux environment wherever they want to do their developing – if that’s on a phone it needs to be on their phone. If it’s on their goggles it needs to be on their goggles.”

Unfortunately for Shuttleworth and Canonical, it seems that developers don’t care quite as much about Unity as Shuttleworth cares about them. “I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers,” Shuttleworth wrote. “I was wrong on both counts.”

Most likely it was economic realities that forced Canonical’s hand. Although Ubuntu is an open-source project, Canonical is a business that needs to make money, and the vast majority of its revenues comes from its enterprise cloud computing efforts. Canonical was one of the earliest advocates of the OpenStack cloud platform and has since become one of the dominant players in it. It also makes money from software containers via its LXD hypervisor and its backing of Kubernetes. Ubuntu Core is another successful project that’s making inroads into the emerging Internet of Things.

But none of these projects need Unity. Those systems run just fine with a command line interface, while GNOME — which is backed by an open-source community much bigger than Unity’s — is more than sufficient for those who do require a desktop environment.

Shuttleworth said he thought Unity’s developers had created a “beautiful, usable and solid” platform, but admitted he had to recognize the market realities.

“I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear,” he wrote. “This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and the product, both of which are amazing. We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile.”

Image: Gustavo_Belemmi/Pixabay