Unity 8 desktop
Finally put out of its misery, or stolen from this world before its time? We’ll let you decide, which best describes Unity 8.
Discerning music fans will remember Queen Latifah’s seminal 1993 album U.N.I.T.Y., which challenged the misogynistic trends prolific in the rap music of the era. Unity the desktop environment has, since its introduction in 2010, challenged things too: users’ patience, their ideas about privacy, and the notion that sideways launcher bars have been a bad idea since Microsoft Office tried it in 2000. Much of the shouting and bluster of seven years ago has died down now. For one thing, Unity, thanks not least to a persistent application bar, maintains some hint of the traditional desktop ideal that GNOME 3 threw out of the window.
People have, on the whole, got used to the idea that navigating through a bunch of cascading menus to find the program you want isn’t really the most efficient way to do things – that a few carefully chosen keystrokes (can’t we have both?–Ed) can get you to where you’re going much more swiftly. Users of Emacs and keyboard-driven window managers have been telling us this for years, but Unity doesn’t force you to learn three- and four- fingered gymnastics to launch an application, and gives you something that looks modern and friendly. Try sitting a novice down in front of a vanilla i3 session to see what we mean here. Unity has made concessions to many of the most uttered gripes (excepting the left-handed window buttons) over the years and the resulting desktop is one that is at least tolerated by many and may actually be enjoyed by a few.
Barring a little uncertainty about where menu bars should be drawn, Unity 7 hasn’t changed a great deal in three years, and 17.04’s default desktop does nothing to challenge this. Unity 7 is effectively mothballed, and the future is Unity 8. At least it was, up until right before this feature was due when Mark Shuttleworth announced it wasn’t. Ubuntu 16.10 offered a technical preview of Unity 8, which despite being a little buggy and rough around the edges, certainly gave an idea of what the final product would be like. With 17.04 we still have what is essentially a technical preview, but one that offers a
“In some ways it’s a shame that we’ll never see Unity 8 in a more polished, final form.”
much more complete experience, and a glimpse of where but for market forces things might have gone. So what can you expect when you select that stylish 8-ball? Well let’s get this out of the way first, it’s probably not something you’ll want to use for your desktop affairs. You’ll be greeted by a sparse looking desktop, with a glaringly empty Scopes window (more on this in a second) and (maybe this was just us) slightly weird font aliasing. But it’s not so different from Unity 7— there’s a launcher bar on the left, a system area (with the familiar volume, network and logging out options) top-right and if you affectionately bump the right-hand edge a stylish application switcher appears. Clicking the Ubuntu button (top left) will slide out a lexicographically sorted list of applications.
Much ado has been made of Scopes and the role they were to play in Ubuntu’s converged future. They are, for all intents and purposes apps such as one would find on other mobile platforms, but apps that can shapeshift into desktop mode on demand. That empty Scopes window can be populated by clicking the up arrow at the bottom and choosing from the current offerings. Unfortunately the selection of available Scopes is pretty barren – there’s a handful of useful/entertaining ones, including Reddit, Wikipedia and the Weather channel. Once you’ve favourited a selection of these, you can flick through them by dragging (or swiping, which feels much less awkward, if you have a touchscreen) the top bar.
Deactivate Desktop Mode in the system menu and an amazing transformation occurs: the active application fills the screen. The Scopes window acts as the home screen on mobile platforms and so can’t be killed (not with conventional weapons anyway) so this will fill the screen in the absence of any other applications. In this way we see scopes have something in common with Android’s widgets, in that they present preview information which the user can expand by opening another application. For example, the Wikipedia scope displays a selection from that site’s “Featured Articles” page, as well as a search bar. Choosing an article will display a short preview and a single image (if available) whence the user can elect to open a web browser to view the rest of it.
Unity 8 was first introduced with Ubuntu 13.10, and back then it was very much an experiment. With this release we’ve seen a great deal of progress since 16.10, but we’d stop short of recommending it for day to day use – it’s still very much a tech preview (and now it’s not going anywhere). We had a few crashes and strange errors (though remember we’re working with the beta and writing this in the past), and the whole experience is still very rough around the edges. But for all that, the sharp window edges look modern, the new system area is tidy and there’s nothing glaringly wrong with how things are laid out. In some ways it’s a shame we’ll never see this in a more polished, final form. But hey, we can at least look forward to how Ubuntu on GNOME will look next year.