1. We are not abandoning Black Lab Linux.
There have been rumors floating that we are going to adopt Fedora or Ubuntu. We already have spins of both, we have a Fedora based spin, Yellow Lab for a few select customers and Black Lab which is Ubuntu based and Silver Lab which is BSD based, once again for select customers. users have asked us to release the Fedora based spin which we will do in 2016. But we are not abandoning the Ubuntu base, our relationship with Canonical teams are strong.
2. You guys are abandoning GNOME.
No we are not. The reason we have reemphasized our XFCE based desktop is because we want to port Black Lab over to the Rasp Pi and some ARM based set-top boxes. GNOME is not a good solution for this. We tried. Out of 75 builds for the Raspberry Pi using GNOME they all failed miserably due to RAM. XFCE takes less RAM and is much better suited for old 32 bit systems and IoT devices.
3. You guys ship Windows and Ubuntu on your hardware.
Yes, we do on a customer by customer basis. Although we do ship Black Lab as the default, we have been known to ship upon customer request a dual boot system. Black Lab Software is a business, and like all other businesses we offer our customers choice. If a customer comes to me and says "I want Windows" Im not going to refuse a sale because I disagree with the customers choice. I inform them of the immense benefit of Linux. Black Lab is by far the most popular, we have three Windows customers and most of the time those customers get a mix of Black Lab and Windows, our RHEL and Ubuntu customers are a small faction and I have one Bodhi Linux customer. But unless a customer requests something else, they get Black Lab Linux by default and Black Lab Linux is extremely popular and continues to be on our hardware.
Thanks guys