Experimental remix finally brings the former Unity 8 back to Ubuntu

Ubuntu Unity Noble Numbat is out, and alongside it, a very much not long-term-supported new variant of the distro: Ubuntu Lomiri.

Along with the official Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" release which appeared in late April was a new version of Ubuntu Unity, as there has been since Ubuntu 22.10. Although it's only a modest change over previous releases, there are a few differences in this release - and what's more, it now has a sibling distro with the desktop formerly known as Unity 8.

The new Ubuntu Unity 24.04 release is the "Noble Numbat" version of Ubuntu Unity. The distro itself isn't dramatically different from the previous releases - which is good thing in a LTS release. Version 24.04 uses the same Unity 7.7 desktop as in version 23.10, and as with many of the desktop remixes, for now upgrading from that older version isn't recommended: there are still some open issues around switching to the newly snap-packaged Thunderbird and the new 64-bit-time-aware libglib2.0-0 package.

It is possible to nudge the updater into offering the upgrade - Canonical even documents how to do this. However, in our testing Ubuntu Unity is not offering the new version yet. We don't recommend trying to force it, for instance with the do-release-upgrade-d command - there are reports of serious breakage.

If you're doing a fresh installation, though, you will see a noticeable difference: for this release, Ubuntu Unity has switched to the cross-distro Calamares installer. This the same installer that Lubuntu has used for some time, as we noted when we looked at Lubuntu 22.04 and the other flavors. In the Noble Numbat release cycle, Kubuntu adopted it too. With Ubuntu Unity, you get the same expanded choice of three installation options as Kubuntu and Lubuntu 24.04: as well as the Minimal and Normal, there's also an additional Full Installation choice, which adds some more (snap-packaged) apps to the OS. The classic Synaptic graphical admin tool for Debian packages is preinstalled, and so is the GDebi graphical .deb package installer - but Canonical's shiny new App Center is not.

Unity still works fine, although it's showing its age in some places. Several of the bundled apps don't integrate with Unity's global menu bar, including the snap-packaged Firefox - and among the optional extras, Thunderbird and Krita don't either. One of the big issues for a Linux desktop today, though, is that Unity 7 is an X11 desktop, and most distros are transitioning to Wayland. Before Canonical cancelled it in 2017, the planned future for Unity was Unity 8, a converged desktop environment that would also run on Ubuntu-powered fondleslabs, running under the Mir display server.

This is still very much around - indeed, the unity8.io website still works. The Mir display server is in active development too, as are environments based on it. The desktop environment is now known as Lomiri, and it runs on Debian. When we tried it, though, we didn't find it worked well.

This continuing development, both inside Canonical and outside it thanks to the UBports community, has provided the ingredients for the new Unity-based Ubuntu Lomiri. For now, this is still an experimental distro; it combines the base Ubuntu 24.04 text-mode part of the distro with the version 0.2.1 of the Mir-based Lomiri shell.

We tried it both in VirtualBox 7.18 and on the bare metal of our venerable Thinkpad W500, and it worked - not perfectly, but much better than the Debian 12 version on either. We also tried it on a geriatric Thinkpad X61 tablet, the only x86 machine with a touchscreen in the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers. To our pleased surprise, it also worked fine even on this very low-end hardware - a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM - but sadly without any touch support.

On all the test environments, it still displays some non-functional controls that are mainly relevant to phones and tablets, such as battery information and an orientation lock control. At boot up, the screen starts with a clock and only reveals the login page on a click.

However, the core desktop functionality works well. There's a status bar, plus slide-in panels on the left and right of the screen: an app launcher on the left, and a notifications panel on the right. By default, the dock is very bare, with just the Lomiri-native Morph web browser, but the app launcher pane also contains Firefox, LibreOffice, a file manager, two terminal emulators, and other tools. Multiple apps happily run side-by-side, windows snap to the screen edge, you can pin apps to the panel and so on, and there's a very snazzy 3D app-switcher.

We did notice that mouse movement is always jerky, and the pointer has a near-constant tremor, but it works. The desktop did occasionally lock up on us - although after some seconds, it automatically restarted itself.

It does feel rather like phone apps running on a desktop. Most apps have no menu bar, although some have hamburger menus, and this iteration of Unity has no global menu bar. When we wrote about Lomiri being included in Debian 12, it took us many tries to get a screenshot of Lomiri running. In this version, it felt genuinely usable. We wouldn't put it in front of a non-techie relative yet, but it approximates the level of functionality in ChromeOS, which has proved to be enough for hundreds of millions of users.

A big driver for this overdue revival is that Mir is a Wayland compositor now. It's not only in Debian, either: the Miracle-WM tiling environment we've covered recently may appear in Fedora, too.

X.org may yet disappear from mainstream Linux soon - although even if it does, it will stick around in NetBSD and the other BSDs for a while yet. If it does, Lomiri may be Unity's best hope for a future - but with the rise of tablets and convertible PCs, that's looking brighter than it has in years.

®