Did everyone see the news yesterday? It would have been easy enough to skip over the story, but Canonical announced its idea for bringing Ubuntu, and therefore Linux, to mobile devices (and we're talking proper Linux, not just Android). If you don't count Android (as most Linux users wouldn't), Linux is the last major desktop OS to make the transition to mobile. The strange thing is that with Ubuntu for Android, Canonical isn't exactly creating a mobile OS, just a way to easily transition from mobile to desktop and back. This sort of straddling the line has both its advantages and disadvantages, but still gives us a view of what the future holds for computing.
Canonical will be showing off the Ubuntu for Android software in full at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. Of course, we should have known that Linux makers wouldn't sit back and let Apple, Microsoft and Google take over the tablet space; and, we should have known that Ubuntu would be the first Linux distro to really push to make the leap. What we couldn't have seen coming was that Canonical would not only bring Ubuntu as a player to the game, but give us a sneak peek into the future of computing. And, we mean all computing, not just desktop or mobile. This is the future.