Goodbye Ubuntu's Unity, I Will Miss You

Canonical decided to drop Unity in favor of GNOME, which is probably not the best decision. I think that it's probably a mistake, but it was also an unavoidable move for the company.

People have to keep in mind that Ubuntu for desktop was never profitable, and it's easy to see why. There are very few ways to monetize a free operating system. The only way to get some money out of it is to provide specialized support for companies, but that's also not a really profitable avenue.

It's very likely that Canonical is making some money from its other products, especially the ones built for the cloud or IoT devices. It's also true that the regular Ubuntu desktop is pushing the brand in other ways, even if not in a financial sense. 

In any case, developing a dedicated desktop environment built from scratch, along with a new display server, must have been draining for Canonical. They might have recouped that money if Ubuntu for Phone took off, but that never happened. 

Sin...