For some time now, the folks at Canonical, and particularly Mark Shuttleworth, have been discussing delivering Ubuntu with a development model that keeps the OS converged for use on desktop, mobile and server devices. We’ve been waiting to see granular evidence of how this kind of unified development might work, and a new discussion forum post titled Default File Manager with Unity8 in Future Desktops provides an example. It lays out requirements for a new file manager to be developed for Unity 8 for desktops and laptops. This would actually be the Ubuntu Touch file manager, now in development.
Nautilus—a file browser found in many Linux distributions and now part of GNOME—would give way to the new file manager under the proposed plan. There have been complaints from the Ubuntu community about the Nautilus file manager as implemented for Ubuntu.
