Seven years after stepping down as chief executive of Canonical Ltd., founder Mark Shuttleworth is returning to the helm.

He’s taking over the reins from Jane Silber, who has been with the Linux software distributor through practically its entire its 13-year history and had served as chief operating officer until assuming the top post in 2010. She wrote in a blog post that the transition is “not a sudden decision” but rather the conclusion of a term that was intended to be temporary from the outset. The executive became CEO with the understanding that the stint will last for 5 years, a time frame she extended partially to help streamline the transition.

Silber said she will stay aboard for an additional three months to ensure that everything is sorted out by the time Shuttleworth will officially rejoin as CEO in May. The reshuffle comes in a time when Canonical is undergoing major changes both on the competitive and organizational fronts.

On Wednesday, The Register reported that the company is laying off more than 80 employees, including more than half of the staffers who worked on Unity, its desktop interface project. Canonical earlier this month decided to pull the plug on the initiative and switch to the widely used GNOME engine that had powered Ubuntu in its early days. Some speculate that the decision was motivated by a desire on management’s part to focus more effort on the enterprise market, which represents a growing source of revenue.

Canonical is making particularly big gains in the public cloud. Ubuntu is among the most popular operating systems on major infrastructure-as-a-service platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, a position that Canonical is actively working to maintain. The company recently introduced a version of the software specifically optimized for AWS that provides an up to 30 percent improvement in boot times and a host of other performance enhancements.

Canonical can be expected to keep focusing on the public cloud under Shuttleworth’s leadership. Silber, in turn, wrote that she will assume a seat on Canonical’s board of directors, “take some time to recharge and then seek new challenges.”

Shuttleworth spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile streaming studio, at last year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin:

Photo: SiliconANGLE