“We are confident that Ubuntu will ship on phones from large manufacturers in 2013,” says Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

Shuttleworth sees the new version of the OS appealing to two markets: entry-level smartphone consumers and enterprises that want to give employees just one device instead of two or three.

While Apple and Microsoft have developed separate operating systems for desktops and phones, Canonical is pushing a single operating system that can adapt to different devices. For example, touchscreen apps developed for the phone OS will also work on the desktop version of Ubuntu.

“We think these things can converge both on the front end and under the hood,” Shuttleworth says. “One of the core visions is complete convergence of the platform from phone to supercomputer.”