14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical Software Engineer for Unity Marco Trevisan reports today on an upcoming update for the Unity Stack on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
When Mark Shuttleworth said Canonical wouldn't develop Unity anymore, there were rumors that Unity 7 will also no longer receive any maintenance work. But Canonical shattered those rumors and said it would continue to patch things in the Unity Stack for supported releases, such as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Truth be told, we didn't actually see any signs of life support for Unity since that announcement, but it looks like the team responsible for keeping the desktop environment bug-free has done some great work lately and managed to squash no less than 27 bugs for the Unity Stack in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
"As part of our regular maintenance work we’ve been doing in the Unity stack, we’ve just pushed to Ubuntu Xenial proposed repository new versions of packages for Compiz, Nux, Unity and Ubuntu themes with various fixes (unity-control-center is coming too)," said Marco Trevisan.
Canonical needs your help now
There's a big list of bug fixes that will soon invade your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS machines to make the Unity desktop environment more reliable and stable, and you can study it at the end of the article. However, they're currently in the proposed repository, so Canonical needs your help to validate their work and speed things up for other users.
If you want to help, all you have to do is to enable the proposed-updates repository form the Software Sources app, then refresh your repos and update the system using the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" command in the Terminal app. Check to see if those proposed fixes work as aspected and report your findings here.