New Unity7 based distro

Desktop
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Hey man, I’m honestly grateful for such an in-depth analysis.

I have stated that this is an alpha test build - this is not feature complete! I have not reached feature freeze yet and hence this is a very barebones desktop with little to nothing changed!

The reason for asking for testers is because I was having issues with the live-session on different workstations/virtual machines with Unity.
This is mostly a test build to make sure that all the packages work nicely and Unity interacts well with everything.

Additionally yes, I have changed the branding from saying ubuntu to synOS Canora but as far as I am aware this is not in fact a violation of copyright as I have not released this for general public - only private testing and aditionally I will be adding my own useful features at the end.
Things like Caja and Mirage have been renamed to DocSurf and Pureview for the specific reason that they will be modified and ‘soft forked’ to have some new planned features like on the fly large-thumb previews, Mac OS-like video and audio preview playback integrated within Caja and Mirage supporting green screen editing similar to Preview on Mac OS X, and many more. Hence the name changes justified - there will be a justified amount of changes that make these apps a fork, not an original!

But this is in a very early Alpha stage!

To put it in perspective I started building this on sixth march and whatever you’re seeing is built as of ninth march! VERY EARLY into development! This was purely meant to see, again, how Unity works on different devices, and whether or not Ubuntu-Server 18.10 works well

which segways me into

The boot issues, app_start time issues and other bugs I have noticed are caused due to be using the ubuntu server 18.10 iso rather than a minimal or default desktop iso. This has been the single major reason for the unnecessary apps and weird issues. And by doing this test, I have figured it out. Based on the feedback I have received by chanath, itzswirlz and now you, Norbert, I have concluded that I will use the default desktop iso, based on 19.04 for the next build.

As for the ubiquity installer issues, I shall be switching from PinguyBuilder to rsync/other manual methods for the next iso building.

There is more I wish to say but it is 3:45 AM IST, and I must sleep

Norbert and everyone else here, I would like to apologize for any inconveniences caused. These are Alpha builds however; not the final and all the issues mentioned here will most definitely be fixed and improved for the next alpha (or hopefully beta)

I sincerely, sincerely thank you all for all your help. I couldn’t have done this without all of you.

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I will list down the features you can expect from the next alpha tomorrow. Hopefully I can change your mind and make you enjoy using this distro @Norbert :smiley:

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Don’t worry about anyone having “inconveniences,” just keep on doing what you do. Consider the work on 18.10 as testing, and then, move to 19.04. There’s not many guys trying to do remixes with Ubuntu any more.

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Hi @chanath ,
I’m back after my long hiatus. I had a lot of work to do and now I finally got back to working on this.
synOS 1.0 Canora is reaching feature-complete levels. I’ll be posting again soon for the Beta 1 build.
I think you and everyone else will agree that it’s gotten a lot better.
Instead of using Pinguy builder I decided to use Linux live squashfs scripts to make sure that even the configuration files of the demo home folder are copied over to the live boot.
Previously was using Radiance theme because Faenza was not working well with Ambiance, but now I’m using a more skeumorphic variant of Ambiance along with a fork of Faenza with even more icons and blue coloration for folders.
I’ve switched away from Caja because it just was not working properly, and am now using a forked version of Nautilus from the old Xenial archives with some extra features. To prevent it from “upgrading” to the ugly GNOME variant of Nautilus with the extra padding, renamed it to DocSurf.

I’ve additionally switched to Ubuntu 19.04 as a base and using the latest Linux Kernel.

There are also a lot of eye candy.

There are a lot, lot more changes.

Even at such an early stage I can already tell you with confidence that synOS Canora is the most feature complete, easy to use and beautiful Unity remix distro, compared to the few that are around.

Will be posting soon. Thanks all. See you soon.

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Hoping this pans out. Couldn’t help but notice that ever since Canonical dropped official support for Unity, Ubuntu has been steadily dropping in popularity in Distrowatch. Coincidence? Gibbs Rule #39

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Is there any update on this? I would love to test out the Beta build!

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@jaime-cruz @londoed hi! Sorry for disappearing, yes this is being worked on, however I had gone on a hiatus due to my exams. Right now I’m working on two important aspects. Ubuntu 20.04 has deprecated a lot of important unity-desktop package dependencies such as the hud package, this making unity tweak tool inoperable. Additionally the default Yaru theme is unusable. I am working hard to patch the hud package in, right now with the temporary solution of calling in xenial packages. I am also working on a new Beautiful skeuomorphic theme.

check this out.

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Thank you for the update. With Focal right around the corner I find myself wondering if I’m going to stay with Bionic, or switch distros. I’ve tried on numerous occasions to use the Gnome desktop and every time I come away frustrated with how slow and unintuitive it is.

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A unity8 based distro would be awesome

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Or your own Desktop Environment. Working on one! :slight_smile: Nice if people would join…

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Debian is releasing an Unity 8 desktop https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-8-Mir-To-Debian

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This is not about Debian, this is about Ubuntu. But still, kind of nice that Debian is playing around with Unity8. :wink:

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If someone is doing something on Debian, it might stay a longer time…:slight_smile:

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Maybe… :smile: You’re right.

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Further to this: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blog-1/post/lomiri-new-name-same-great-unity8-265

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Okay-if Debian releases a newer version of something, or really ANYTHING, that’s what we are using. Debian unstable is Ubuntu’s foundation.

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Minor nit — I’m pretty sure Ubuntu pulls from Debian’s ‘Testing’ repos.

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It’s unstable-I remember testing Cinnamon and then finding the bug with System Info, then the release got moved to 4.4.8-3 (testing) to (unstable) and then it was synced (although technically testing /= unstable and we could pull it in if we wanted to)

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Pulls mostly from the Unstable repos. Actually, the same Debian devs might doing that for Ubuntu. As the Debian Unstable packages are never tested by Debian, some of the junk that are there available in Ubuntu too, from long years.

Anyway, all that is nothing to do with Unity DE, as it was created as a Compiz plugin. I’m sure Unity would nicely work with a Debian system running Unstable repos, even Testing repos.

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gnome-terminal doesn’t work