It's Official, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Now Lets Users Move the Unity Launcher to Bottom

We reported this as a rumor last month, but now it is official, and the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories.

It is probably the most requested feature ever for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and Ubuntu Unity developer Marco Trevisan announced yesterday on his Google+ page that Canonical finally decided to merge the hard work done by the Ubuntu Kylin team to bring the Unity 7 Launcher on the bottom edge.

Marco Trevisan mentioned in his quick announcement that one needs to run a command to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen. Curious to see if it works, we have executed the respective command, but nothing happened, and it looks like there's no button or check box in the system settings to allow you to do that.

As we are currently running the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS daily build on one of our computers here at Softpedia, we've regularly monitored the repository for an update to the Unity package. Thus, as of today, March 19, 2016, after updating and rebooting our PC, the Launcher has been moved to the bottom edge.

Here's how Unity 7 looks at the bottom edge in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

If you still don't believe it, below we've attached an image gallery to show you what the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, due for release later this spring, on April 21, 2016, looks like with the Unity Launcher placed at the bottom of the screen. And it also appears that the Unity Dash is displayed correctly, at the bottom.

At the moment of writing this article, we have no idea if Canonical will implement a visual setting in the Apperance -> Behaviour panel for users to easily switch between having the Unity Launcher on the left or at the bottom of the screen for the final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but you can do it by running the commands below.

Move the Unity Launcher to bottom