Mark Shuttleworth has revealed that the ‘classic’ Ubuntu desktop will be a thing of the past come the release of Oneiric Ocelot.

Responding to a bug report on an accessibility issue in Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Shuttleworth says: -

“We made very good progress on [accessibility] in Natty, but will miss the goal of perfect [accessibility]. We’ll nail it in Oneiric. That’s OK, because we have the Classic desktop fallback in Natty, but will not in Oneiric.”
This won’t come as a great shock to many; it was previously announced that Ubuntu-2D would be shipping on the 11.10 disc for users unable to run the Compiz-based version.