14 DAY TRIAL // After releasing the OTA-13 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, Canonical is now working hard on putting all the pieces together for next month's Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.
Ubuntu 16.10 will be officially released on October 13, 2016, but until then we will be able to get an early taste of its new features by downloading the Final Beta ISO images, which for some of the opt-in flavors is called Beta 2. However, for Ubuntu itself, this will be the first and only Beta release.
We've already told you that Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) is now officially powered by Linux kernel 4.8, as well as that it already received some of the packages from the recently released GNOME 3.22 Stack, and today Will Cooke informs us that Canonical has been working hard to improve the low graphics mode of the Unity 7 user interface.
"Unity 7 has had a low graphics mode for a long time but recently we’ve been making it better," says Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical in the blog announcement. "Improvements have been made to reduce the amount of visual effects that are seen while running in low graphics mode."
Ubuntu 16.10 ships with Unity 7 by default
As you might have guessed already, Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) is still shipping with the Unity 7 user interface by default, as it appears that Unity 8 is nowhere near to being ready for the masses and not even worthy as an option in the login manager, at least not on the Ubuntu 16.10 Final Beta ISO images.
Therefore, Canonical's Ubuntu development team is working these days on bringing various improvements to the Unity 7 interface, in particular the low graphics mode, to reduce the amount of animation for various desktop elements like the Unity Launcher, the application menus, and window switcher when running Ubuntu in virtual machines
Additionally, they also managed to reduce the shadows for windows, as well as to remove the fade in, fade out, and blur effects. How will this affect you? Well, if you're running Ubuntu on VirtualBox, you'll notice that everything on the screen is a lot faster now. Take a look at the video below if you don't believe us!
In the same manner, these Unity 7 low graphics mode improvements will have an impact on the remote desktop session, when you are asked by a friend to help configure his/her computer via VNC (Virtual Network Computing), RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), or any other supported remote connection protocol.
For now, it looks like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is already getting these Unity 7 low grahics mode enhancements, but it will take a while before they land in Ubuntu 16.10, which is moving to use systemd for the user session. To force low graphics mode on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), add the following lines to the ~/.config/upstart/lowgfx.conf file.
start on starting unity7
pre-start script
initctl set-env -g UNITY_LOW_GFX_MODE=1
end script
