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 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?
Unity-esque UIs1 are available in various Linux desktops, officially or unofficially. Most are more like tribute acts than faithful recreations. Unity was more than the sum of its parts – it wasn’t just a vertical launcher and a giant app grid launcher.
It was designed by a team of paid design professional, iterated on over many years with feedback from frequent rounds of user-testing. It was its own distinct thing; an end-to-end desktop with a consistent and predictable behaviour.
Which is why Unity didn’t change its fundamentals (workspaces, panels, launchers, applets etc) after its desktop debit 2011, save for those under-appreciated Smart Scopes and the option of locally integrated menus, the latter not arriving until 2014.
Muqtxdir’s project isn’t a formal effort to revive Unity, so there’s no Discord or greater ambition behind it than what’s shown.
But it shows that with talent and the right raw materials, people can build cool things – and someone could recreate Unity for a modern era.
Image credit top: Muqtxdir
- Before the comments fill up: yes, Lomiri exists. But Unity 8 was not Unity 7, and while the UBports project have used the bones of the effort in Ubuntu Touch, Unity 8 was never finished by Canonical, on the desktop side. Besides, it had a different lineage to Unity 7 and a different goal. ↩︎