Unity Desktop Environment has first major release in 6 years.

Apparently the old Ubuntu Unity Desktop isn't dead after all! Huh! Who knew!

May 03, 2022

Remember when Ubuntu Linux shipped with the Unity Desktop… and it made so many people annoyed with Ubuntu that they ended up axing the entire Unity project?

If you thought, “Well, that’s the end of Unity!” you would not have been alone!

Turns out there is a small team of developers (possibly just one?) that have been slowly tinkering on Unity for several years… and have just released the first new major version of Unity in over 6 years!

Unity 7.6

From the announcement:

Here are the changes in Unity 7.6:

The dash (app launcher) and HUD have been redesigned for a modern and slick look.
Fixed broken app info and ratings in dash preview.
Fixed the ‘Empty Trash’ button in the dock (it now uses Nemo instead of Nautilus).
Migrated the complete Unity7 shell source code to GitLab and got it to compile on 22.04.
The design is much flatter but retains the system-wide blur.
The dock’s menus and tooltips have been given a more modern look.
The low graphics mode works much better now and the dash is faster than ever.
The RAM usage in Unity7 is slightly lower now, while the RAM usage has been reduced substantially to about 700-800 MBs in Ubuntu Unity 22.04.
Fixed the standalone testing Unity7 launcher (this will help Unity7 contributors).
The buggy tests have been disabled and the build time is much shorter (this will help Unity7 contributors).

I won’t lie: never was a big fan of Unity. The design concepts always struck me as just a little… off. And the problems with performance, usability, and stability — which lasted for oh-so-many years — really turned me off of Unity in general.

But, hey! If improvements are being made, I’m game to give it another shot! And kudos to the developer for keeping the project going! Love seeing passion projects like this continue to get development!