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Unity is back! An unofficial Ubuntu flavor featuring the good old Unity 7 desktop environment saw its first stable release as Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.04.
Rudra Saraswat, a member of the Ubuntu community has been working hard in the past few months to put together a special flavor of Ubuntu with Unity 7 as default desktop environment.
He calls it Ubuntu Unity Remix, and it brings good old memories to those of us who have used Ubuntu for a long time.
Built in-house by Canonical and based on the GNOME desktop environment, Unity has been the default desktop interface of Ubuntu for about six years.
The first Ubuntu release with Unity by default was Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) and the last one was Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark).
In April 2017, Canonical announced that it stopped the development of its Unity interface for Ubuntu and all future releases will be shipping with GNOME as default desktop environment.
As you can imagine, many users were upset about this change and still wanted to use Unity, but no one would continue the development, except UBports for the mobile interface of the Ubuntu Touch OS.
On the desktop side of things, there were a few community efforts to bring back Unity, but it would probably never be recognized again as an official flavor.
You can still use Unity if you’re installing the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) release, which will be supported until April 2021.
With that in mind, after all this years, people still want to use Unity in Ubuntu, and this brings us to Ubuntu Unity Remix, which has saw its first stable release based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).
I took Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.04 for a spin and it brought back good old memories for me. The spin looks great and works like a charm.
You can download it too right now from its Ubuntu Community Discourse thread, where you can join the discussion and let the developer know what you think about it.
There’s no official website at the moment of writing, but you can also join the Telegram Channel here and Telegram Group here for any requests you may have for the developer.
In conclusion, I really like Ubuntu Unity Remix and I think it has a bright future, though you shouldn’t expect any new major features on the interface side, just the good old Unity 7. Check it out in action below!
Last updated 4 years ago
