So as most of you probably know Mark Shuttleworth just announced that they will be switching to GNOME 3 and Wayland again for Ubuntu. So I would like to on behalf of the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams to welcome them and say that we look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak.

It is worth mentioning that even as we been competing with Unity and Ubuntu we have also been collaborating with them, most recently on working with them to integrate the features they wanted from GNOME Software like the user reviews, but of course now sharing a bigger set of technologies collaboration will be even easier.

I am personally happy to see this convergence of efforts happening because I have for a long time felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there, so by now having reached a position where Canonical, Endless, Red Hat and Suse again share one desktop technology stack and along with consulting companies like Centricular, CodeThink, Collabora and Igalia helping push parts of the stack forward we are at least all pulling in the same direction.

This change should also make life easier for ISV who now have a more clear target if they want to try to integrate their UI with the Linux desktop as ‘the linux desktop’ becomes a more meaningful term with this change.

And to state the obvious, we will continue our effort around Fedora Workstation to continue to lead on innovation and engineering and setting the direction for where Desktop Linux goes in the future.