14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Will Cooke informs the Ubuntu Linux community today about the latest progress of the Unity 7 to GNOME Shell migration and transition process for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
As you might have guessed already, Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team is working hard these days to finish the migration from the deprecated Unity 7 user interface to the GNOME Shell one, which will be the default in Ubuntu 17.10, and they're showing us today the latest progress on this major transition.
This week, it would appear that the team managed to migrate the Amazon launcher and favorites, replace Unity Control Center with GNOME Control Center, and reset the scaling factors. However, they need users to test the latest Ubuntu 17.10 daily builds and report bugs for things that have not been migrated correctly.
"We’ve been working on the migration and transition processes for users going from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell. We’ve worked on migrating favorites, the Amazon launcher, resetting scaling factors and migrating unity-control-center shortcuts to gnome-control-center," says Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical.
The current state of Unity 7 in supported Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu 17.10
Will Cook has also updated us on the current state of the Unity 7 user interface, which is still used on all supported Ubuntu releases, including Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10, and Ubuntu 17.04, saying that a new layer of improvements and bug fixes is coming soon to the low graphics mode.
But these enhancements will only be available on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), as Canonical believes that it's the most used Ubuntu release these days being supported for 5 years not nine months like the regular ones, improving the responsiveness of Unity 7 when running in a remote desktop session.
In addition, it would appear that Canonical expects the Unity 7 session to still work in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, but not without some issues that could occur along the way after its official release later this fall on October 19, 2017, so do report any bugs you might encounter!