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The devs behind the Ubuntu Unity Remix distribution announced today a new development milestone of their upcoming UnityX 10 desktop environment.
Announced in early May, UnityX is the successor to Unity7, and, the next major release, UnityX 10, is planned for later this year as part of the upcoming Ubuntu Unity Remix 21.10 distribution, which, of course, will be based on the forthcoming Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) operating system release.
“UnityX brings forward Unity7’s keyboard-centric features and is aimed at normal computers and small tablets with keyboards/palmtops.”
UnityX 10 promises great new features compared to Unity7, including a new sidebar design for the application launcher and the opened apps view, a new panel with system tray icons, including for standalone Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and PulseAudio icons, a Logout shortcut, as well as an pplication launcher and an “opened apps” shortcuts.
The new panel also shows RAM, CPU, and battery usage, as well as the current date with time next to it, and lets you easily access keyboard shortcuts. UnityX 10 will also feature support for system notifications, a new settings utility, and has been rewritten in Fish, while parts of it are still written in Python 3.
You can check out the new look and feel of the upcoming UnityX 10 desktop environment in the images above, courtesy of the UnityX development team, and if you want to compile it yourself on your Debian or Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution of choice, you can download the DEB binary of the second Release Candidate from here.
Remember that this is still work in progress, so use at your own discretion and NOT on a production environment. Some features may be missing or incomplete, and you should expect bugs to be present. If can track the development progress of UnityX on the project’s GitLab releases page.
Update 03/08/21: A third Release Candidate has been released today that brings an improved HUD, which works with GNOME apps like Nautilus and GNOME Builder and multiple apps at the same time, as well as Unity7-style notifications.
Update 20/08/21: A fourth Release Candidate was released to implement the Unity Control Center from Unity7, but with custom panels for UnityX, add a new logout dialog, add suspend, shutdown, reboot, and logout options, add the polkit authentication agent, and the ability to change the background without having to exit the session.
Update 23/12/21: A sixth Release Candidate is now available for testing with a completely redesigned panel, a new dock, and a redesigned launcher similar to that of Unity7, and support for changing the icon theme in Unity Control Center.
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