Mark Shuttleworth announced this past week at the October 2010 Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) that Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) will not use the standard GNOME user interface. Instead Ubuntu 11.04 will use the new Unity interface that was developed by Canonical (the company that owns Ubuntu) for the Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE) 10.10. Unity was not so successful (mainly to it performing sluggish) in the UNE but Canonical has plans to fix it up nice for the Desktop Edition 11.04. Why will Ubuntu 11.04 be using Unity? Well next April the GNOME Shell will ship. The GNOME Shell is a significant modification of the whole GNOME user interface. It will look something like this. Canonical has decided that the GNOME shell is not a suitable choice for Ubuntu due to it being more difficult to use along with several other reasons. So instead the Ubuntu will work on a desktop version of the Unity interface that is already used for Netbooks. But Ubuntu 11.04 will remain a GNOME distribution and it will still run all the GNOME applications. It will just use Unity instead of the GNOME Shell. Rumors are that 11.04 will also use Compiz and try to have to the beauty and graphical effects like other modern Operating Systems such as the Mac OS X.
Here is an example of the Unity interface.
Creating their very own interface is a brave step for Ubuntu but may reward Ubuntu with much success, we’ll just have to wait and see…
Ubuntu for Beginners & Beyond 
Wow love the pic, how did you obtain it?
Yes, it is very cool. The picture is Unity in the Netbook Edition. It just gives you a very vague idea of what the final Unity Desktop will be like.
Unity will also be using Global Menus, see more here: https://ubuntu4beginners.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/ubuntu-1104/.
I think Unity is one of the coolest things thats happed to the Linux world in a long time.
Also if your interested in staying up to date on Ubuntu news you can subscribe to this blog using the tools on the top right-hand part of this page.
[…] different from all previous versions. The moment you start it up you’ll see a difference, the user interface will now be Unity which makes the desktop look very different then it has in previous versions. I very much like the […]
I have the unity interface. It reminds me of that rubbish M$ operating system. Please provide gnome as the default presentation. I like a simple looking menu based system that allows me to find the applications that I want in a menu list without having to do a search. It took me half an hour to work out how to get to the system menu and boot with the ubuntu classic to get rid of the Unity crap!
Please bring back gnome!
John
I was basically wondering if you ever considered changing the page layout of your website? Its well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you can include a a bit more in the way of content so people can connect with it better. You have got a great deal of wording for only having one or two graphics. Maybe you could space it out better?