M A Muqtadir, a developer involved in the design theme of Ubuntu Yaru and the Vanilla OS distribution, has presented the first results of an experiment aimed at recreating the Unity user interface using modern components from the GNOME stack and the Wayland protocol. The demonstrated prototype is built on the Wayfire compositor, which uses Wayland and allows for resource-efficient user interfaces with 3D effects reminiscent of 3D plugins for Compiz. The side and top panels, pop-up dialogs, and the Dash interface for navigating installed applications are implemented using the gtk4-layer-shell extension and widgets provided by the libadwaita library.
It’s worth noting that developers from the UBports project are enhancing the Lomiri user interface (the last update in 2025), which branched off from Unity 8, while the Ubuntu Unity distribution has taken over the development of the Unity 7 codebase (the last update 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 shell, which was ported to the Qt5 library and display server Mir, was included. szerver Initially, Canonical planned to replace the Unity 7 shell with Unity 8, but those plans changed, and with Ubuntu 17.10, a return to the default GNOME with the Ubuntu Dock panel was made, halting the development of Unity 8.
Forrás: opennet.ru
