14 DAY TRIAL // UBports community announced today their port of Canonical's deprecated Unity 8 desktop environment for personal computers, ready for installation in an initial development phase.
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.
"Just when you thought that Unity 8 and the dreams of convergence were fading, we're introducing today the Unity 8 UBports edition with Bionic Beaver support on GitHub to reignite the fire and rebuild the dream," says UBports project leader Marius Gripsgård.
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.
Here's how to install UBports' Unity 8 port on Ubuntu
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.
In other words, you'll have a functional Unity 8 desktop environment, but can't use most of your favorite apps, but only those that have been designed for Canonical's Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones and tablets. Without further ado, install Unity 8 with the following command.
bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ubports/unity8-desktop-install-tools/master/install.sh)
You need to run the command above in the Terminal app. Once the installation script was downloaded and Unity 8 is installed, log out of your current session and select the "Unity8" entry from the login screen, whether you're using LightDM or GDM. That's it, enjoy Unity 8 and let us know how it works on your PC in the comments below.