Canonical is working on multiple projects at the same time, and it's often difficult to understand their plans, but Director of Product Strategy Engineering Olli Ries has shed some light on how their inner workings are structured and how things are evolving, from the inside out.

Users know that there is Ubuntu and a number of official flavors out there, but that's not everything in the ecosystem, as Canonical is currently working on other stuff than just the Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu for phones. In fact, a lot of the company's efforts are geared toward projects that are not yet visible, and that will bear fruition in the near future.

In case you forgot, Canonical is also working on its own display server, Mir, its developers are porting Unity 8 for the desktop, a new type of packages (Snappy) are being proposed for the distribution, and all of this is just scratching the surface.

In the end, it's about the plans for a converged operating system and everything that Canonical does points in the same direction.

The roadmap for Canonical's products is impressive

It's difficult to get a bird's eye view of the Ubuntu ecosystem from the sidelines, so Olli Ries has decided to put everything in a nice graph that encompasses everything they work on, and there are quite a few things.

"The chart shows Ubuntu as the center of gravity for everything that revolves around it. We will be seeing a solid 15.10 leading to the Long Term Support release 16.04. I personally expect some improvements around the Dash and general usability improvements for users with high resolution screens in addition to the work that’s done to polish and stabilize Ubuntu to the level an LTS release deserves," wrote Olli Ries.

The chart itself is very interesting, but above all else, it shows that Ubuntu for regular users is still pretty much the focus of their efforts. The Ubuntu community is afraid that Canonical is putting too much work into the mobile space or containers, but in the end, everything they do seems to come back to the desktop.