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Canonical Founder Says Recent Changes In Ubuntu Were Necessary To Prepare the Company For an IPO (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical was doing well with Ubuntu and cloud and container-related technologies, such as Juju, LXD, and Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS). In addition, its OpenStack and Kubernetes software stacks, according to Shuttleworth, are growing by leaps and bounds on both the public and private cloud. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said "in the last year, Ubuntu cloud growth had been 70 percent on the private cloud and 90 percent on the public cloud." In particular, "Ubuntu has been gaining more customers on the big five public clouds." What hadn't succeeded was Canonical's attempt to make Unity the universal interface for desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Shuttleworth was personally invested in this project, but at day's end, it wasn't getting enough adoption to make it profitable. So, Shuttleworth said with regret, Unity had to be dropped. This move also means Canonical will devote more of its time to "putting the company on the path to a IPO. We must figure out what steps we need to take moving forward." That means focusing on Canonical's most profitable lines. Specifically, "Ubuntu will never die. Ubuntu is the default platform on cloud computing. Juju, MaaS, and OpenStack are nearly unstoppable. We need to work out more of our IoT path. At the same time, we had to cut out those parts that couldn't meet an investors' needs. The immediate work is get all parts of the company profitable."
For the desktop replacement, you still have distros based on debian which have fairly up-to-date release schedules.
KDE Neon is Kubuntu with a different name.
Linux Mint is Ubuntu with a streamlined UI.
In both of these you can swap out to plain gnome2 or gnome3, xfce, enlightenment, or windowmaker if you want.
For server, you're kinda boned. You can go back to debian, which isn't too bad. CentOS with epel is a functional cross, but theres no way you are running bleeding edge with a RHEL distro. The plus about RHEL is that rpm packaging is dirt simple and you can have a bleeding edge environment if you don't mind the upkeep (1% project overhead in my exp).
My worry is that Ubuntu is going to follow the path of RedHat. Where Ubuntu takes over debian as the defacto fork and updates trickle back to debian. Usurping the debian development and testing in the process. Anyway I suspect tinfoil and pennies to be given away freely in this thread.
-dk
Access to funds to expand, without having to sell half your soul to a VC?