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Unity desktop environment and Ubuntu Unity maintainer Rudra Saraswat announced today details about the continuation of the UnityX effort, a variant of the Unity7 desktop with extra features and support for newer GNU/Linux technologies.
UnityX (formerly UnityX 10) was initially designed as the next major release of the Unity desktop environment used by the Ubuntu Unity official flavor. However, it would appear that UnityX is now being developed as a flavor of the upcoming Unity 7.7 release that will offer more customization options.
While it will look pretty much the same as Unity7, this new flavor comes with some interesting benefits over Unity7, such as Compiz-free use, the ability to use a window manager of your choice (yes, you’ll be able to use Wayland), replace or remove the top panel, as well as the ability to adjust the opacity of the Unity Dash and Launcher.
UnityX also comes with an all-new HUD based on Plotinus, a HUD-like command palette for GTK3 apps, which supports more applications than Unity7’s HUD and can open multiple apps at the same time.
Moreover, the System Settings app will let you change most of UnityX desktop’s settings, and there’s also a new way to configure UnityX and replace its components.
Support for Unity 7.7’s UWidgets plugin/widget system will be available as well, along with a new session indicator, Unity7’s appearance indicator, and the ability to open files directly from the Global Menu.
Both UnityX and Unity 7.7 will ship as part of the upcoming Ubuntu Unity 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release in late April 2023. Until then, those of you who want to give it a try right now can manually install it by following the instructions provided by the developer on the project’s GitLab page.
If you find the manual installation overwhelming, you’ll still be able to test UnityX before its final release from the software repositories of Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Gentoo, and Manjaro Linux in the coming weeks. Until then, check out Rudra’s blog post to see this new Unity7 flavor in action!
Image credits: Rudra Saraswat
Last updated 1 year ago
