Ubuntu Unity 20.04 Review

Instead, Unity was axed after its final appearance in Ubuntu 17.04, as Ubuntu moved to Gnome 3 and its Gnome Shell interface, a move that ended the convergence dream and marked an attempt to reign in developer costs, too.

It seemed that Unity, which many Ubuntu users and developers grew to appreciate and even love for its keyboard-centric, efficient workflows and clean interface, was to be relegated to the proverbial “dustbin of history”. Today, there are some Ubuntu users who are happy with the switch to Gnome 3, but not all. Some Unity fans are still using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is the last official Unity-based release that is still supported, with updates being provided until April 2021. As it is still in the repositories, some users have just installed Unity 7 on newer Ubuntu releases, too.

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After Unity development was canceled, there were stirrings. The UBports community took over the development of Unity 8 as the interface for the Ubuntu Touch phone operating system. There were also indications that several developers intended to put out a new desktop flavor of Ubuntu with Unity 7, the last fully developed and operational version, as used in Ubuntu 17.04. The tech media even reported in 2019 that Canonical had given its blessing to such endeavors, including the use of trademarks for such a distribution, an altruistic move on the company’s part.

These rumblings hadn’t produced many tangible results until recently, with the release of Ubuntu Unity 20.04 LTS, an unofficial Ubuntu “flavor” that combines the best of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the Unity 7 interface.

Development

What is probably the most remarkable aspect of this story is that this Ubuntu remix is developed by an Ubuntu team member, Rudra Saraswat, who is also a Linux Foundation Certified Developer. He lives near New Delhi, India and is ten years old. He started using Ubuntu 17.04 with Unity 7 when he was eight years old. He really liked it, was disappointed when it was discontinued, and decided to bring it back. This isn’t his first effort in putting together a Linux operating system, as he has previously built several, including Krob Linux for servers.

Saraswat engaged in a number of Twitter surveys of Ubuntu users to create this new distribution. He decided to go with Nemo as the file manager, as it is a fork of Nautilus that reincorporated many of the needed features that Nautilus dropped a few years back such as an “up one level” button and “open as root”. Nautilus is still included by default, as I suspect it cannot be easily removed from the Gnome desktop without breaking things, but Nemo is the file manager of choice on the Unity launcher and is a better file manager than Nautilus anyway.

Saraswat also eschewed Ubuntu’s Gnome Display Manager and replaced it with LightDM instead, which provides the Unity sign-in. He designed a new logo and new wallpaper which gives Ubuntu Unity its own distinctive “Ubuntu family” look. Otherwise, the release is fairly “stock” and Unity 7.5.0 is little changed from its Ubuntu 17.04 days.

There are future plans for this distro, as Saraswat is hoping that Ubuntu Unity will be accepted as an official Ubuntu flavor. He has positioned this first release with that aim, including using no outside PPAs or non-free applications.

The 7 May, 2020 Ubuntu Unity 20.04 LTS release actually garnered quite a bit of attention from the tech press, with write-ups in Forbes and TechRepublic, among others.