Developer M A Muqtadir, involved in the design of the Ubuntu Yaru theme and the Vanilla OS distribution, has presented the first results of an experiment to recreate the Unity user interface using modern components of the GNOME stack and the Wayland protocol. The demonstrated prototype is based on the Wayfire compositing manager, which utilizes Wayland and allows for resource-friendly user interfaces with 3D effects similar to Compiz 3D plugins. The sidebar and top panels, pop-up dialogs, and the Dash interface for navigating installed applications were developed using the gtk4-layer-shell extension and widgets provided by the libadwaita library.
It should be noted that the UBports team is developing the Lomiri user interface (last updated in 2025), which branched off from Unity 8, while the Ubuntu Unity distribution has taken over the Unity 7 codebase development (last updated in 2022). The Unity 7 branch is built using GTK and GNOME technologies. In Ubuntu 16.10, in addition to Unity 7, the Unity 8 interface was included, which was adapted to the Qt5 library and the Mir display server. server Initially, Canonical planned to replace the Unity 7 interface with Unity 8, but plans changed, and in Ubuntu 17.10 there was a rollback to the default GNOME with the Ubuntu Dock panel, while the development of Unity 8 was halted.
Source: opennet.ru
