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Canonical announced yesterday that it will drop Unity 7 from Ubuntu 18.04 onwards, reverting back to the Gnome desktop environment. I know all the larger desktop environments quite well, Gnome, KDE and Xfce; however, Unity is the one I am more comfortable with and on which I I feel more productive.

I would therefore like to know if there any desktop environments forked from Unity 7 that could be installed on Ubuntu. I understand we are still one year away from the shift, but it is never too early to test the alternatives and eventually choose a project to contribute to.

Luís de Sousa
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    Please abstain from using this thread to discuss the strategic decisions behind the shift back to Gnome. – Luís de Sousa Apr 06 '17 at 12:51
  • Did you do any research that could have helped you answer your own question? – DK Bose Apr 06 '17 at 13:03
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    If I Google "unity 7 fork" I get this question as first result.... – Luís de Sousa Apr 06 '17 at 13:06
  • Thanks Rinzwind. I do not use Unity 8 or Mir; at least not yet. But I would see this fork as a valid answer. – Luís de Sousa Apr 06 '17 at 13:57
  • Unity 7 is not currently discussed for forking that I've seen but Unity 8 is. Unity 7 is reliant on Compiz though so in my opinion, I'd rather Unity 7 end and Unity 8 be forked. || Side note: Unity 7 is based on the GNOME stack so the "back to GNOME" statement could imply Unity 7 and not just vanilla GNOME. This has not been confirmed yet. – Michael Tunnell Apr 06 '17 at 20:29
  • Michael Tunnell, I've never used any demo version or whatnot of Unity 8, how much does it differ (meaning outwardly, not under the hood) from Unity 7? I hope everything I loved about Unity 7 was not lost in starting from scratch with a new stack. – Inkayacu Apr 16 '17 at 02:37
  • Have you considered making another desktop environment look like unity. I know that mate now has a unity layout. I myself am using xfce configured to look like unity because I prefer the unity user interface but I prefer the less ram consumption of xfce. There are also many tutorials out there on making kde look like unity. – yolo7398 Apr 20 '17 at 15:30

3 Answers3

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  • yunit is a Unity 8 fork (Unity8org was the original name).
  • Ubports. A Q&a about this has some insights in this. They use Ubuntu touch as their base so decided to not join yunity.

Still nothing on Unity 7.

MathCubes
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Rinzwind
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    This is an important development, that is worth following. However, I am more interested on Unity 7 for now. – Luís de Sousa Apr 06 '17 at 13:59
  • Unless fork of Unity 7 appears, this will be the next best alternative. – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Apr 06 '17 at 14:00
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    actually I think Unity 7 is not worth forking for many reasons but mostly it is based on outdated technology that will cease to be useful once Wayland takes over. Unity 8 fork is much more interesting to me. – Michael Tunnell Apr 06 '17 at 20:27
  • @LuísdeSousa I highly doubt anyone will fork Unity 7. Even Canonical couldn't keep up with the stack they chose. It just wasn't a good choice at the time. – Seth Apr 14 '17 at 16:21
  • @Seth, Unity 7 brought a set of ideas and usability metaphors that are agnostic of technology. I would expect a Unity 7 fork to eventually address the technology issues. – Luís de Sousa Apr 16 '17 at 13:03
  • @LuísdeSousa "addressing the technology issues" would require a complete rewrite, hence Unity 8. – Seth Apr 16 '17 at 15:18
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    Those are both actually the same thing. Unity8org was the original name that eventually got changed to yunity. UBports has a version and then we also have Yunity. Yunity is focused on desktop and UBports is focused on mobile. – Goddard Apr 17 '17 at 18:27
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Artemis Desktop

Formerly known as "Enjade" (read more here)

The Artemis Project aims to bring the best environments to continue the venerable Unity 7 desktop in the modern Linux space. With an open, friendly community and a willingness to make the Linux desktop more friendly, the Unity legacy will live on while bringing new innovations to the table.

enter image description here

The pseudo-fork build on top of Plasma is Artemis Core. This is the project I started back in April when Unity 7 and Unity 8 was announced 'abandoned'. Everyone is more aware of Core as it has a better chance of surviving in modern technologies, like Wayland.

You may want to consider taking a look at Artemis Pure, the project's actual Unity 7 fork. Pure gets the same feature updates as Core, though it come a little later as Core is the primary focus. This is probably what you're looking for, though there is no set release yet as we are in the process of renaming files from unity to artemis-pure (or simple pure, for that matter). You can check this out on our GitHub repositories.

Information for both of these platforms can be found on the About page.

Community
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Marquis Kurt
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We have two active ports working on separate parts.

For desktop(Yunity) : https://github.com/yunit-io/yunit Most discussion is on how to port it to Wayland, but don't believe it is finalized. Also has a reddit board. : https://www.reddit.com/r/Yunit/ They have a logo challenge at present.

For mobile : https://ubports.com/ For more information check out their forum here : https://forums.ubports.com/topic/170/a-vision-of-where-to-go-after-ubuntu-touch-s-death UBPorts also has a discussion area for Yunity on their forum now - https://forums.ubports.com/category/36/yunit

Details are still being worked out.

Unity 7 has no port as already stated. This is just to give correct information for Unity 8.

Goddard
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    You should probably read the existing answers before filing your own. – Luís de Sousa Apr 18 '17 at 08:49
  • Why not try explaining it instead of being sarcastic because I clearly did read the answers and filled people in much better then the ones above. I also up voted your answer and question. – Goddard Apr 18 '17 at 16:38