14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developers have proposed to make a new flavor built solely with the Unity 8 environment that would help them freely experiment without having to worry about the stable part of the operating system.
Users can now install a preview of the Unity 8 desktop environment in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and run it there if they meet certain requirements. For now, the new desktop will not work with proprietary drivers because it also relies on Mir, which is not yet supported officially by NVIDIA and AMD.
In any case, having a new Ubuntu flavor would greatly help developers test their ideas in a fresh ecosystem that is easy to run from a USB stick and that already features most of the ported applications.
“The desktop team would like to add a new flavour (ish, we don't plan to have any formal releases at this point) of Ubuntu which contains the Unity 8 desktop and the new applications which have been developed for the touch project. The initial intention is to provide a product which developers can use to figure out the work that's required to make a desktop product based on this software usable, and to create a space for experimentation to figure out the best ways of carrying out the required integration.”
“We still plan to migrate pieces of the current desktop over, but we are very mindful of the need to not destabilise the desktop and upset its users, and are hopeful that developing this flavour in parallel will mean that migrations will truly happen when software is ready instead of as a result of pressure to get work into the hands of users early,” said Ubuntu developer Iain Lane.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now using Unity 7 and it will probably remain in place as default at least for the next Ubuntu 14.10. The goal of the Ubuntu developers is to make Unity 8 and Mir default by Ubuntu 16.04, which is the next LTS, but if things progress smoothly, we might get to see a better implementation sooner than that.
It's unclear what the name of this new flavor would be, but if the proposition goes through, we might get an ISO in the next few months. This would make it easier for users to test the Unity 8 and get a feel for it before it becomes default.
When Canonical replaced the old GNOME 2 with Unity, the shock of the switch was so great that even today it's being mentioned from time to time in the community. Having a dedicated Unity 8 flavor might alleviate some of those problems.