The new desktop environment is taking shape

Aug 27, 2015 11:42 GMT  ·  By

We've recently written how Canonical is making Unity 8 act and looks like a proper Linux desktop, and developers have been quick to show us the progress.

Canonical is busy with its Ubuntu Touch platform, but at the same time the company is also putting a lot of effort into making Unity 8 run on the desktop. Some great progress has been made, and a lot of features have been added, as a task switcher and multiple workspaces.

These items are not implemented exactly as they are found in the current Unity 7 desktop, but developers have promised that they intend to have feature parity. The new generation of the Unity desktop won't be too different, at least visually, from what the users are familiar with, which is actually a very good decision.

Unity 8 is still far away from a being a daily driver

Even if the desktop has started to look more like something that we would recognize, it doesn't mean that it's ready for users. Sure, you can test the new desktop in a variety of ways, but you're not going to be able to do your work in it.

A completely functional Unity 8 desktop is expected to land with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, in a version that will be also powered by Mir and Snappy package. It's going to be a very interesting release, and it's less than a year away.

“A very short video showing off the Unity 8 window switcher with keyboard shortcuts. Because I'm running it from a local build of trunk inside of Unity 7, the switcher shortcut is mapped to ctrl+tab instead of alt+tab, to avoid conflicts with Unity 7,” wrote Michael Hall on Google+.

He also annotated a screenshot of the desktop so that users will be able to tell what's happening. Check out the video below to find out more about how Unity 8 is doing.