Unity 7.6 Released for Public Testing as the First Major Update to Unity7 in 6 Years

Unity 7.6

Ubuntu Unity maintainer Rudra Saraswat announced today the release for public testing of the upcoming Unity 7.6 desktop environment as the first major update in the last few years.

Featuring a new flat UI while retaining the system-wide blur, Unity 7.6 promises major improvements like redesigned Unity Dash (app launcher) and HUD, as well as refreshed styles for dock’s menus and tooltips for a modern and slick look, and improved low graphics mode to make the Unity Dash faster.

The upcoming release also improves the app info and ratings in the Unity Dash preview, improves the “Empty Trash” button in Unity Dock to use the Nemo file manager instead of Nautilus, and lowers the RAM usage to about 700-800 MBs in Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS.

Of course, a few issues are fixed in the upcoming release, such as the standalone testing of the Unity7 Launcher, as well as longer build time and buggy tests, which will help Unity7 contributors. Also, it looks like the Unity7 shell source code was migrated to GitLab and it now compiles on Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS.

“Unity 7.6 will be the first major release of Unity in 6 years (the last release was in May 2016). We have restarted the active development of Unity7 and will be releasing new versions with more features regularly,” said Rudra Saraswat.

As mentioned before, Unity 7.6 is now available for public testing, and you can give it a try by running the commands below in a terminal emulator on your Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS installations.

sudo wget https://repo.unityx.org/unityx.key
sudo apt-key add unityx.key
echo 'deb https://repo.unityx.org/main testing main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unity-x.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y unity

I’ve tested Unity 7.6 in Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS, and here’s what it looks like compared to the previous version.

If you do test the upcoming Unity7 release and encounter bugs or other issues, don’t hesitate to report them on the project’s GitHub page. The final release of Unity 7.6 should be out in the next few weeks.

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com