Ubuntu 17.10 Begins Transition To GNOME Shell Desktop By Default

Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland.

If fetching the pending daily-live ISOs, you'll find that Unity 7 is no longer the default nor even offered as an option from the login manager (though those upgrading from past releases to the eventual Ubuntu 17.10 final release will still have Unity 7 installed and the packages are available from the universe archive).

The default GNOME Shell at least for now is still with an X.Org Server session, but the GNOME Shell atop Wayland is available as an option with the default package-set.

For now, the GNOME Shell experience on Ubuntu 17.10 is pretty close to stock GNOME and at least doesn't yet resemble Unity with any extra extensions or theme modifications...

It will be interesting to see what the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop with GNOME Shell looks like by October.

Stay tuned for more details as Ubuntu 17.10 Artful advances. GNOME 3.24.2 is what's currently found in the Artful archive.