The developers of the Ubuntu Unity project, which develops an unofficial edition of Ubuntu Linux with the Unity desktop, announced the formation of a stable release of the user shell Unity 7.6. The Unity 7 skin is based on the GTK library and is optimized for efficient vertical space usage on widescreen laptops. The code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Ready packages are formed for Ubuntu 22.04.
The last significant release of Unity 7 was published in May 2016, after which only bug fixes were added to the branch, and support was carried out by a group of enthusiasts. In Ubuntu 16.10 and 17.04, in addition to Unity 7, the Unity 8 shell was included, translated to the Qt5 library and the Mir display server. Canonical originally planned to replace the Unity 7 shell, which uses GTK and GNOME technologies, with Unity 8, but plans changed and Ubuntu 17.10 returned to the regular GNOME with the Ubuntu Dock, and the development of Unity 8 was discontinued.
The development of Unity 8 was picked up by the UBports project, which develops its own fork under the name Lomiri. The Unity 7 shell was abandoned for some time, until a new unofficial edition of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Unity, was created on its basis in 2020. The Ubuntu Unity distribution is being developed by Rudra Saraswat, a XNUMX-year-old from India.
Among the changes in Unity 7.6:
- The appearance of the application menu (Dash) and the HUD (Heads-Up Display) quick search pop-up interface have been modernized.
Was before:
- Transitioned to a flatter appearance, but retaining blur effects.
- The design of the sidebar menu items and tooltips has been redesigned.
- Improved work in low-graphics mode, when the vesa driver is enabled if the native video drivers cannot be used.
- Improved Dash panel performance.
- Slightly reduced memory consumption. As for the Ubuntu Unity 22.04 distribution, its Unity 7-based environment consumes about 700-800 MB.
- Fixed issues with displaying incorrect app and rating information when previewing in Dash.
- The problem with showing the empty cart button on the panel has been fixed (the handler based on the Nautilus file manager has been moved to use Nemo).
- Development moved to GitLab.
- Assembly tests have been reworked.
Compared to the May test release of Unity 7.6, the final release has the following changes:
- Improved rendering of more rounded corners in the Dash panel.
- The dashboard has been replaced with the unity-control-center app.
- Added support for accent colors in Unity and unity-control-center.
- The list of skins has been updated in unity-control-center.
Source: opennet.ru