Ubuntu Linux heads to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical & Ubuntu — Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will announce at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL, that they will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Canonical arrives at this announcement on a run of momentum: the Unity interface Shuttleworth introduced with Natty Narwhal earlier in 2011 was framed as putting users first, and in September the company shipped an official Ubuntu One client for Windows, extending its sync service beyond Linux. In October, Canonical also confirmed Ubuntu will be the primary operating system behind HP's upcoming cloud service.
Shuttleworth's announcement at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando extends that arc beyond the desktop and server: smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs become first-class Ubuntu targets, positioning Canonical as one of the few vendors pushing a single Linux distribution across every screen category.
First-order effects
- Canonical now has to fund engineering for touch-optimized and embedded variants of Ubuntu alongside its desktop and cloud work, stretching a company of its size across four hardware categories at once.
- Device makers building phones, tablets, and smart TVs gain a new non-Android, non-proprietary OS candidate, with Shuttleworth personally carrying the pitch at the Developer Summit.
Second-order effects
- Ubuntu's move puts it in direct competition with Android and iOS for OEM attention, forcing Canonical to differentiate on openness and its existing desktop install base rather than app-store scale.
- The expansion strengthens the pull of Canonical's adjacent services — Ubuntu One syncing and the HP cloud relationship — since a multi-device Ubuntu footprint makes those offerings more valuable per user.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry moves toward converged operating systems where one codebase spans phone, tablet, TV, and PC, pressuring rivals to defend separate-per-device software stacks.
- A credible open-source alternative in consumer devices would give regulators and carriers leverage against the Android-iOS duopoly, though whether OEMs bite remains the open question.
The trend: Linux distributions are pushing out of the server room and onto consumer screens, with Canonical betting that convergence across devices is the next battleground after the desktop.