If Canonical hadn’t burned through cash and goodwill during its smartphone detour in the mid-2010s, Ubuntu would likely still ship with the Unity desktop today – albeit in an evolved form.
What would that form actually look like?
Well, you don’t have to shut your eyes and imagine, thanks to Ubuntu community member Muqtxdir, who’s experiment in “re-building ubuntu’s unity shell in a wayfire session through gtk4-layer-shell and libadwaita widgetry” (sic) gives us a sideways glimpse.
Muqtxdir, who help maintain and develop Ubuntu’s Yaru theme and contributes to the immutable Vanilla OS Linux distribution, recently shared a video of his alt-future tinkering and the results are worth a look:
The stuttering in the video is from processing, apparently
The demo shows a working launcher, dock (with BFB at the time) and panel, all immediately recognisable as Unity (in spirit, if not identical in detail), but with a flatter look and ample use of background blur.
Cosmetic flattery will get you… someone?
Ubuntu’s Unity desktop in er, simpler times
Unity-esque UIs1 are available in various Linux desktops. Heck, the modern Ubuntu desktop built on GNOME with a slew of extensions is ostensibly similar to Unity!
Some feel more like tributes than faithful recreations. Unity was always more than the sum of its parts – it wasn’t merely a vertical launcher and a giant app grid launcher, but a set of APIs, a design language, a reasoned approach to how the desktop behaves.
Unity ‘recreations’ on other DEs isn’t new
Which makes sense. Canonical had a ream of paid design professionals to build it, iterated on it over many years and conducted frequent rounds of user-testing to improve it. It was a distinct thing; an end-to-end desktop that was consistent and predictable.
And it worked. Unity didn’t change its fundamentals (workspaces, panels, launchers, applets etc) after its desktop debut 2011, save for those under-appreciated Smart Scopes and the option of locally integrated menus, the latter not arriving until 2014.
Muqtxdir’s project doesn’t appear to be a formal effort to revive Unity, mind. There’s no Discord to join, Git repo to pull from or a bolder ambition to rally behind. For now, it’s just some retro-future weekend coding fun.
But it shows that with talent and the right raw materials, people can build cool new things for Linux – even if some of those new things might have much older origins.
Image credit top: Muqtxdir
- Before the comments fill up: yes, Lomiri exists. Unity 8 was not Unity 7, and while the UBports project have taken the bones of the project forward in Ubuntu Touch, Unity 8 was not finished by Canonical on the desktop side. It had a different lineage to Unity 7 and a different end goal. ↩︎
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