With the start of the New Year, it seems like Ubuntu is back in business with a brand new touch-based operating system.

Per reports, the company has posted a countdown teaser on its Ubuntu homepage that has been currently set to expire on Jan. 2. The countdown banner sports a "So close, you can almost touch it" tagline. The tagline suggests that the operating system will support touch-screens.

The new information, however, won't come as much of a surprise to many as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in a Slashdot interview last month, made it pretty clear that the company was heading towards a lot of changes and a cross-device operating system was getting ready. The new OS would arrive with full mobile and tablet support for Ubuntu 14.04 sometime in 2014.

At that time, Shuttleworth said that the company could arrive with "one OS that runs on the phone and your supercomputer. We're close to that now - we know Ubuntu makes a great cloud OS and a great server OS and a great desktop. So I think the next frontier is to create a seamless experience from the embedded world to the cloud. And yes, that's very much what we are focused on at Canonical."

Back in October, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Shuttleworth announced that the company is planning on porting its popular Linux variant Ubuntu to the already crowded mobile OS market, destined for smartphones, tablets and even TVs.

"This move has reportedly been in the works for two years, and won't bear fruit until 2014, though the Unity UI has been remarkably mobile-friendly since last year, as shown above. Of course, it's not easy going as a new mobile Linux in an Android-dominated market, but Ubuntu's planning some interesting features, like shipping different versions of the OS to each device, but the ability to switch between them at will, allowing users to make their tablet handle like a computer when and if they want," The Verge reported.

Early last year, Ubuntu's Android platform was also announced that would be a fusion "of both Google's mobile operating system and the Linux-based Ubuntu desktop OS. While you're on the move, it works like any other Android phone, but when you place the handset into a dock, it becomes a fully-fledged version of Ubuntu with Unity UI."