Unity 7.6 will be the first major release of Unity in 6 years (the last release was in May 2016). We have restarted the active development of Unity7 and will be releasing new versions with more features regularly.
I was never a fan of Ubuntu’s Unity, but I’ve seen quite a few people over the years who miss it. Your call has been answered – this first release has a a lot of visual touch-ups and updates to make it look a bit more modern, and there’s bugfixes in here, too, of course.
I`ve loved Unity in the beginning. Later it was a little irritating because they`ve blocked standard tray. There was addon for that of course, but it didn`t look as good as native tray. And that was only one drawback to me. I`ll be happy to test new Unity.
I wonder if this ends up becoming a standard Ubuntu remix like Kubuntu.
From all the desktop environments i used Unity 7 was the best one. Once it got abandoned by Ubuntu i used the version from the repositories for a while. After i tried to stick to GNOME based Ubuntu. But it turned out that for me and from all desktop environments i used GNOME 3 was the worse one. I finally made a decision and migrated to KDE. It turned out to be a great decision and i am now happy with KDE. Might give this “new” Unity 7 a try. I do worry that the other applications used from GNOME 3 are by now far out of place in such desktop environment. And that is just not something i would be prepared to tolerate. Having the KDE option where nothing is misplaced.
I commend them for trying something different, but I wasn’t a fan of unity either. It may have been ok for touch screen devices. Touch screen UIs were in vogue a few years ago even developing for desktop targets, but I didn’t like it. I felt too many UIs went overboard at the expense of less context and added indirection. I prefer more information and context that we had with traditional desktop UIs.
I’m sure it can be changed, but looking at those screen shots I think they went overboard with the purple, haha 🙂
Unity was a huge pain for me. At the time I was new to Linux and rather locked-in to Ubuntu and =hated= Unity at the start, and tonnes of grief with Canonical’s unwillingness to bend to what people really wanted. But over time the community chipped away at them and by the time they abandoned it they had delivered something I actually quite liked. Pretty and flexible/configurable enough that I barely noticed it — which is really what I want in a DE.
And just when it got to that point they dropped it like a hot potato and foisted the most ridiculously user-hostile heap of steaming desktop onto us.
I could never adjust to the crappy choices of Gnome and the even-worse hostility to user choice so I jumped ship to another distro and have never looked back. Just in time, too, because I understand Gnome is getting worse and worse.
I’d certainly tickle the nostalgia bone and give “new” Unity a try — but quick checking and I don’t see it as an easy option for me in Manjaro. Maybe I’ll install another distro on the side just to check it out.
Anyways, kudos to those that keep the niche stuff alive!
rlees42,
I think this mirrors lots of people’s grief with Canonical at the time. They wasted too much political capital fighting their own users, and this was at a time when windows users were very frustrated with microsoft taking a similar stance with metro. Their efforts to ignore users felt oddly coordinated, haha. Vendors that push for what they want rather than what users need can end up drawing much more criticism than necessary and it takes a lot of time to earn back trust.
I liked gnome in the v2 days, but disliked gnome 3 shell. I need to give it a shot again but I’ve been content with KDE and xfce for that matter even though it’s a bit less refined.
Yeah, kudos to them!
Unity was great for little netbook screens (and little netbook specs) back in the day. I imagine older, underspecced machines will continue to be its bread and butter these days, what with most modern options (Gnome, KDE and Cinnamon) being rather bloated/slow on older hardware. Seems like a nice, slick alternative to MATE, Xfce, LXQt or what have you. Now the question is whether it will stay as well maintained as those projects.
I would’ve liked Unity so much more if only they’d let me MOVE THE DAMN DOCK TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN
That was such a glaring an long-standing oversight.