Ubuntu systems team has forked Gnome Control Center as Ubuntu Control Center which will be used in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards.

Bilal Akhtar, a young Ubuntu developer writes, "Gnome-contacts will be installed by default, clutter will be on the CD, totem will be updated to the latest version, and Ubuntu 12.10 should ship with a near-complete GNOME 3.6 stack (sans Shell, of course, and control-center)."

The fork of Gnome Control Center presumably gives Ubuntu more control over how they want to enhance the user experience by tweaking it the way they want fit.

One may wonder how different will the Ubuntu Control Center be from Gnome Control Center, Bilal explains, "Most importantly, support for subsections written in Python, etc. Right now, clicking on the Ubuntu One icon opens up a new window, and we don't want that to happen. Also, there's the whole revamp of the Appearance dialog, that now includes Unity-specific settings too."

Ubuntu engineer Ken VanDine further explains, "The changes to control center probably won't be much more than we already have in the gnome-control-center that is in 12.04, it is only a fork in the sense of how we maintain the patches. Our patches have become too hard to manage as-is, so forking means it is easier to rebase on upstream as needed."

The report comes from Ubuntu Developer Summit going on in California.