14 DAY TRIAL // As reported earlier in the week, Canonical held its Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event between November 15 and November 16, 2016, during which members of the Ubuntu community were able to learn more about what's coming to the Ubuntu 17.04 Linux.
In a session entitled Convergence Q&A, which you can watch entirely in the video attached at the end of the article, Canonical's Will Cooke, Richard Collins and Michał Sawicz discuss the road to a fully converged Ubuntu desktop that will run on any hardware and screen size. As you might know, Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) shipped with a technical preview of the Unity 8 user interface (UI), which some of us were able to test.
Why some of us? Because currently Unity 8 is not compatible with proprietary graphics drivers for Nvidia and AMD Radeon GPUs, doesn't run well on any virtualization software, and if you're lucky to have a computer that runs Unity 8, you'll have a barely functional Unity interface where only a few apps are working, and the 3D performance is not all that great.
A much evolved Unity 8 session is coming to Ubuntu 17.04
As Canonical's convergence vision continues for Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), due for release in April 2017, the company will provide users with a more evolved Unity 8 session where more applications run as Snaps. Additionally, it also looks like the Snappy Store will be fully set up to run Snaps, as Snappy is becoming the default in a future version of the Debian-based operating system.
Unity 8 developer Michał Sawicz also reveals the fact that Ubuntu 17.04 and beyond will offer a mature Unity 8 interface that will be offered as a Snap package for both mobile and desktop platforms. There will also be full window management support, a new Mir abstraction layer called Miral, which will be integrated into future versions of the Mir display server, and better Unity 8 support in pointer-based environments.
A new application drawer is another big change coming to the Unity 8 user interface in Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), which will act as an extension to the Unity Launcher for displaying all of your installed applications, including Snaps, Libertine-based apps, and traditional apps. Ultimately, multi-monitor support is being worked on as well for future versions of Unity 8. Now we'll let you enjoy the videos below for more details.
