Ubuntu does something radical.

It's been a while since I posted anything about Linux, and more of my visitors use Macs than Linux boxes, but this seemed interesting.

Some years ago Ubuntu was the leading Linux distro. It was used as the basis for many other Linux flavours including Pear linux (that I used to love) Mint and a bunch of less memorable names.

There came a time when it seemed like the Linux desktop environment was trying to go all bleeding edge and make radical changes. Gnome (previously a conservative appearing design) launched version 3, dramatically different from before and somewhat difficult to use, losing a lot of users. Then Ubuntu went all Windows 8 and released the Unity desktop: designed to work the same across phones, tablets and even ordinary computers. Some lauded it, most either just got on & tried to use it or rapidly migrated to Mint with either Cinnamon or Mate desktops and safe familiarity. I tried it early on - it was fairly horrible, not very stable, and made Windows 8 seem intuitive and polished - but quickly binned it, sticking with openSUSE and then various flavours of Mint.

The world turns.

And so I've just heard that Ubuntu have ditched Unity as a desktop and gone to Gnome 3 as their default, now many iterations on and much better. And it also now looks like Fedora, apparently. I'm tempted to try it on my 'testing' drive, over-writing whatever is there at the moment (might even be Fedora - can't remember right now) just to see.

It would be nice if the creator of  the first Linux distro originally suggested to replace Windows on the desktop has found a formula that will give it as more mainstream appeal.