Might be ready by the time Versatile Velociraptor is out

Aug 6, 2015 11:47 GMT  ·  By

Unity 8 is the desktop environment on Ubuntu for phones and it's going to land on the desktop as well. Developers have published a few screenshots to let us know what kind of progress it's been made.

The new desktop environment has come a long way since it was first made available on the desktop flavor of Ubuntu, and it's actually starting to look a lot like the previous one. One of Canonical's goals is to reach feature parity with Unity 7. That means that users who are now familiar with the current design of Unity 7 should not have a hard time moving to Unity 8, as most features will be available in the new desktop as well.

One of the fears expressed by the Ubuntu community was that Unity 8 for the desktop would look and act a lot like the mobile counterpart. People were saying that they don't want a mobile experience for their PCs, and they would be right if that were the case. The truth is that what you see today shown as Unity 8 is not really representative of how it will look in the end. Sure enough, some progress is being made, and we might start to recognize the layout and design, but it's still pretty far away.

Unity 8 is coming along

The screenshots that you see in the gallery below were provided by Michael Hall, one of the developers and community managers for Ubuntu. He's been playing with the latest version of Unity 8, and this is pretty much its current state.

The fact that he chose to use Versatile Velociraptor on the background is a nice touch (pun intended), but please keep in mind that Michael doesn't decide the name of the next version of Ubuntu and that job is still in the hands of Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical. Enjoy!

Unity 8 (6 Images)

Unity 8 work in progress
Unity 8 work in progressUnity 8 work in progress
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