Ubuntu users now know for certain when Unity 8 officially arrives on the desktop flavor of the distribution

Oct 15, 2014 07:11 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu desktop flavor hasn't been the developers' focus for some time now, but that is going to change very soon. The new Desktop Team Manager at Canonical, Will Cooke, has talked about the future of the Unity desktop and laid out the plans for the next few Ubuntu versions.

Users might have noticed that Ubuntu developers have been putting much of their efforts into the mobile version of their operating system and the desktop has received less attention than usual. They had to focus on that version because most of the things that are changed and improved for Ubuntu Touch will eventually land on the desktop as well.

Not all users know that the desktop environment that is now on Ubuntu Touch will also power the desktop version in the future, and that future is not very far ahead. In fact, it's a lot closer than users imagine.

Next Ubuntu LTS will have Unity 8 by default

The mobile platform is now using Unity 8, the next generation of the famous desktop environment developed by Canonical. It's very different from Unity 7, the current version on the desktop, although it will share a few of the design aspects.

It took the Ubuntu developers almost two years of concerted efforts to get this far with Unity 8 for mobile phones and tablets, so it will take them almost as long to get it working for the desktop.

Canonical now has a new Desktop Team Manager, Will Cooke, and he has explained, in detail, the blueprints for bringing Unity 8 for regular desktop users. Ubuntu 14.10 will feature Unity 7 by default (Unity 8 development version as an option), Ubuntu 15.04 will still have Unity 7 by default and Unity 8 as alternative, and the first distro to get the new Unity 8 might be Ubuntu 15.10.

He says "might" because he’s not certain what will happen until then. The Ubuntu developers might be ready on time or not. What is sure is that Unity 8 will certainly be the default desktop in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is the next long term support version that will land in April 2016.

Why the new Ubuntu desktop is so special

You might think that it's just another update to the desktop environment, but Unity 8 is actually more than that. Because of the way Unity 8 is built, users will be able to get the latest version of most of the packages included in the OS right when they are released. They will no longer have to wait for a new version of Ubuntu to get a fresh build of an important application or library.

"Traditionally a given release of Ubuntu has shipped with the versions of the applications available at the time of release. Important updates and security fixes are back-ported to older releases where required, but generally you had to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest set of applications. The new desktop packaging system means that application developers can push updates out when they are ready and the user can benefit right away," says Will Cooke.

There will be resistance in the community

Unity 8 will be a very big change and Canonical will feel the pushback from the community. It rarely happens that such an important update gets accepted by all users right from the start. There will be many who will say that Unity 7 was the best and that Unity 8 is a failure. That is inevitable.

Canonical provides now a different ISO image for Ubuntu 14.10 with the Unity 8 desktop, which is called Next. It's a Live CD and shows a very rudimentary version, which is basically an oversized tablet. That will change dramatically in the next year, and hopefully there will be enough time for the community to get used to the new desktop.