Ubuntu's focus on improving the desktop experience for users is starting to take hold. Clearly nothing happens overnight. More than two years ago, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth went out on a limb and said that his ambition was to make the Ubuntu desktop better than Apple's famously good-looking desktop.

Last summer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu distribution and of Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, challenged the free and open source software (FOSS) to deliver a desktop experience superior to Apple's.

Last summer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu distribution and of Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, challenged the free and open source software (FOSS) to deliver a desktop experience superior to Apple's.

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced in his blog that Canonical will be "hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality." "Those desktop experiences ideas" are Ubuntu's design ideas.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has big dreams for Linux. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the progress of Ubuntu, which releases a major update every six months and keeps getting more and more user friendly. But user friendly is just the beginning. Shuttleworth wants Linux to be prettier too.

Mark Shuttleworth joins us for a video podcast to discuss the upcoming 9.04 release, Ubuntu history, Linux on the desktop, impacts of cloud computing, Ayatana, the community and Ubuntu, Ubuntu and Canonical, Google Summer of Code, Ubunet, and much more!

I’m a fan of Ubuntu Linux, and think that Mark Shuttleworth is a good guy. However, to many in the Linux community, the South African entrepreneur is a rock star, a god. What’s more, Ubuntu Linux is seen by many as the first, and only, Linux distribution that might have a shot at gaining market share on the desktop.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) today in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu's default user interface across both the desktop and netbook editions. Unity, which was introduced as the new netbook interface in the recent Ubuntu 10.10 release, will arrive on the desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 next year.

During a phone briefing today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth described the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop, server and cloud strategy to members of the IT media. WorksWithU tuned in and posed some key questions to Shuttleworth. Here are 10 highlights from the call.