14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is almost ready to offer the next generation of its Unity environment for the desktop, and it will be accompanied by Mir, their brand-new display server. One of the community's biggest worries was that GTK apps will have a problem running on the new desktop, but that issue won't be a problem.
Many of the applications we use and love on Linux systems and in Ubuntu are GTK+ based, which might cause a small problem since Unity is Qt based. You might think that running GTK+ apps in a Qt environment might pose a problem, but that's not the case, as we can see in this video made by Sorin Popescu.
To be fair, the native Mir support for GTK+ apps was pushed into the repositories all the way back in the summer of 2014, for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), but it's been refined a lot since then. When it was introduced, there were many bugs, as it was to be expected, but they have been fixed over time. So much so that it's now possible to test those apps in a native setting, in Ubuntu 15.04.
Unity 8 won't be so different from Unity 7
Despite the fact that it's new technology, based on QML and the work done on the mobile platform of Ubuntu, Unity 8 won't be so different from the current desktop. One of the developers’ goals is to provide an experience similar to that of the current Unity desktop so that users won't have to learn how to use it all again.
This means that most of the stuff will be under the hood, but there will also be some minor visual differences, like an upgrade theme, new icons, and some new functions. In any case, Canonical is aiming to release Unity 8 and Mir as default solutions in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is scheduled for launch in April 2016.
Enjoy!
