14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is working on the next generation of Unity for Ubuntu, which is going to arrive by default in a couple of years. Until then, the upcoming Unity 8 is taking some baby steps in becoming a full-fledged desktop environment.
Unity 8 is the desktop used on phones and tablets that run Ubuntu Touch. The way it's designed right now makes perfect sense, but only for those platforms. In order to accommodate desktop users, developers need to make some adjustments.
It still has a long way to go, but we now see that some changes are being made and that it's looking more like something we can use with a mouse and keyboard.
For now, the Unity 8 desktop still looks like an oversized tablet, but that is slowly changing. In the end, users should have a pretty similar experience with the current desktop implementation, but with all the bells and whistles of the modern one.
Unity 8 is slowly coming together
Ubuntu users were worried that they would end up with a desktop that was basically a clone of the phone version, but that is not the case. In fact, most of the work so far was just to make Unity 8 run on the desktop, and nothing else was done about the design and layout.
Michael Zanetti, a software engineer at Canonical, has posted a very interesting video showing some of the progress made with Unity 8 on the desktop.
The first thing that you will notice is the nice login screen, with a background this time, but the actual desktop experience is what’s changed.
The tablet and mobile platforms have full-screen apps and windows, which would be a problem for desktop users, but now Unity 8 has resizable windows. This is a great improvement and it really makes the desktop look more like something that could be used in other settings as well.
So far, the modifications have not landed in the Ubuntu Next Daily Build, the flavor that comes with Unity 8 and Mir by default, but that is probably just a matter of time.
Canonical's push for convergence at the code level, which would apply to all platforms, is finally showing some tangible results. The goal is to have a single operating system that you can install and use on desktop or mobile phone. By the looks of it, that goal is actually much closer than it seems.
