The big news in the Ubuntu world this week is Mark Shuttleworth's announcement that he'll be stepping down as CEO of Canonical and transitioning the CEO crown to Canonical insider Jane Silber.  Here's the news, with some thoughts on what this means for Ubuntu and Canonical.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, will on Thursday begin making commercial applications available to Ubuntu users directly through the desktop, in a step designed to simplify software installation.

Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of minor usability glitches. The project, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will entail a collaborative effort by Canonical's new design team and the Ubuntu community to fix one hundred usability bugs before the release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix is free to download from Thursday 23 April. Also announced were the simultaneous releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition.

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.

Canonical announced that Mark Shuttleworth will be stepping down as CEO in March to be replaced by Canonical COO Jane Silber, reports eWEEK. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project has released its first alpha of Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx"), which speeds boot-time while kissing the GIMP editor goodbye.

Canonical has launched a new service, dubbed Ubuntu Single Sign On. The effort seeks to simplify and unify all login services for all Ubuntu-related sites. Sound like a good idea? Here's the deal...

Canonical’s CEO crown officially transitioned from Mark Shuttleworth to Jane Silber on March 1. During a phone discussion with The VAR Guy yesterday, Silber shared her top priorities for Canonical and Ubuntu. She also disclosed plans to make another key executive hire at Canonical.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, sat for a video interview with Dell Cloud Computing Evangelist Barton George. In it, Shuttleworth takes a "service pack" shot at Windows 7 and covers numerous questions about Canonical's business and cloud strategy. Here's the video - plus some perspectives from WorksWithU.