Which Gnome environment is going to appear in Ubuntu 18.04?

Solution 1:

ubuntu-gnome-desktop is a meta package that installs GNOME Shell, Ubuntu-specific settings, and any other packages that the Ubuntu GNOME team feel should be on a default install. That is what we will be seeing in 18.04's Ubuntu (and there will not be a separate Ubuntu GNOME flavour). From the release announcement of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04:

As announced last week by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will include GNOME instead of Unity. Specifically, it will be GNOME (including gnome-shell) with minimal Ubuntu customization. Next year, if you are using either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS, you will be prompted to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For normal release users, this upgrade should happen with the release of 17.10.

As a result of this decision there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu. The development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging resources and focusing on a single combined release, that provides the best of both GNOME and Ubuntu. We are currently liaising with the Canonical teams on how this will work out and more details will be announced in due course as we work out the specifics.

GNOME Flashback (originally called GNOME Fallback) is still available and will continue to be available. However, it is not the main desktop shell from GNOME, GNOME Shell is.