As you are aware, last year Canonical decided to stop the development of its futuristic Unity 8 desktop for Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS. Days after their sad announcement a few community members appeared interested in taking over the development of Unity 8, the most promising one being Yunit.
However, the Yunit project didn’t manage to improve Unity 8 for desktops in the last few months as much as the community would have wanted, and, after a long battle, they decided to pass the baton to UBports team, which is announcing the initial build for devs and an official website for Unity 8.
This first Unity 8 build maintained by UBports apparently supports the next-generation Wayland display server through the latest Mir 0.30 display server, which is still developed by Canonical. We believe that UBports will try to improve Wayland support so you can run your favorite Linux apps soon.
Until then, all developers and anyone who wants to help UBports continue Canonical’s Unity 8 and Ubuntu convergence dream is welcomed to join the dedicated UBports Unity8 Developers group on Telegram, and check out the installation instructions below.
If you want to install UBports’ Unity 8 desktop environment on your personal computer, you should have either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which is currently in development. Also, you should be aware of the fact that most X11 apps won’t work.
Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-s-unity-8-desktop-revived-by-ubports-with-support-for-ubuntu-18-04-lts-519890.shtml
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
Comments are closed.