Ubuntu Gnome Shell Remix Now An Official Ubuntu Flavour

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For those that don’t know, Ubuntu GNOME is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that ships with GNOME Shell by default, instead of Unity. The distro also includes other GNOME applications that aren’t available by default in Ubuntu.

It was announced today on the Ubuntu Gnome Shell Remix mailing list that as of the 13.04 release, they will receive the new name of Ubuntu GNOME and will be an official Ubuntu flavour. Here is what the guys had to say about it:

We are pleased to announce that Ubuntu GNOME is now an official Ubuntu flavour. We recently applied to the Tech Board to become an official Ubuntu flavour and the Tech Board approved our request at their most recent meeting!

We will not be participating in this week’s Beta 1 Release but we are planning to release images for the Final Beta at the end of the month. Daily image builds are currently being set up and we except that they will be available within a few weeks.

As we touched on above, the official name of the distribution has changed, this has been a concious decision from Jeremy Bicha, Ubuntu GNOME developer with this comment on the mailing list:

The official name is now “Ubuntu GNOME”; no “Remix”, no “Edition”. I like the simplicity of this name and the GNOME Foundation Board has made it clear that we are not welcome to use derivative names like GNOMEbuntu as our official name.

Conclusion

Personally I think this is a very positive move, not only for GNOME, but for Ubuntu as well. As many of you know, Unity if the default shell in Ubuntu but a lot of users don’t like Unity. So having an official GNOME version of Ubuntu available will bring smiles to many users faces.

Will you be switching to Ubuntu GNOME? Or are you already using it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below…