According to Ubuntu's official development schedule, Ubuntu 17.04 , also known as Ubuntu Zesty Zapus, will be released this week. This is the 26th version of Ubuntu, and it will still feature Unity 7 as its main desktop environment, as well as the official Ubuntu GNOME flavor.
The new version will be released on April 13th as scheduled, and among other new features, the version will have kernel 4.10, X.org 1.19 and MESA 17.0.3.
Unity 7 will be the default desktop environment in this version and will include some new features , but these are limited to bug fixes and stability issues discovered in recent months. Gnome, while not the default desktop, will also include several new features, including the latest version, Gnome 3.24.
Despite the announcement, Unity 8 is still in the official Ubuntu 17.04 repositories
The various programs that make up the Gnome desktop will also be included in the Ubuntu 17.04 repositories, but not in their latest version, i.e., version 3.24. Instead, they will be in earlier versions, depending on the decision of the Ubuntu and Ubuntu Gnome teams. Thus, Nautilus, Gnome's most popular file manager, will be version 3.20.
According to last week's announcement, GNOME will become the default desktop environment next year, in 2018, with the release of the next LTS version. Until then, Unity 7 will remain the default. Also noteworthy is the inclusion of new versions of Unity 8, an unstable desktop environment that, despite not being released for Ubuntu, is still available in the distribution's official repositories.
Ubuntu 17.04 will be a stable and final version, but due to last week's announcement, this future version is still a development version, a version where we can see how advanced the synchronization and operation between Gnome-Shell and Ubuntu is.