Regarding Ubuntu Unity and a call for help

Flavors Ubuntu Unity
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Hello everyone,

Let me start off by introducing myself:
I’m Maik, one of the team members of the Ubuntu Unity project since 2020. I’ve been using Ubuntu since the 7.04 release, am a forum team member of Ubuntu NL and a Ubuntu Member. My role in the project is moderating the Telegram and Discord channels of Ubuntu Unity and provide support there. I also tested ISO’s before they we’re released.

I’ll be honest and open with you:
Our project lead and I have been absent for a long time, I left around the 24.10 release and in my case it was because of a personal and private matter that i left for a longer period. Don’t worry, all is going excellent now and i recently returned to jump in and help out.
I can’t speak for Rudra but all i know is that he had less and less time around the 25.04 release because of exams and going to the university. This is still the case and, no matter what, more important than anything else. Something i deeply respect and we can’t blame him for that.

With me gone for a longer period and Rudra not having the time, sadly resulted in bugs not getting fixed and things not getting tested properly or at all from my point of view. If i’m not mistaken the ISO’s are being automatically generated and tested with no human interaction.

As you all know, we didn’t have a Ubuntu Unity 25.10 stable release this time around because we found critical bugs that prevented us from marking the ISO as ready. But these bugs are also present when you upgrade from 25.04 to 25.10 or try to install the Unity desktop on top of another flavor. I also know that there’s more going on since the past few releases of Ubuntu Unity from 24.10 onward which needed patching, fixing but didn’t happen due lack of time and man power.

In short: It got worse, Unity is broken and needs to be fixed.

However, i nor @fuseteam (whom i’ve been talking to the last couple of days) have any technical/developer skills to do this and we both do not know what it takes to be a maintainer; but we’re actively searching for solutions and what we two could do in the meantime to keep things going. We’re on the same page and dedicated when it comes to Ubuntu Unity.

That’s why i’m reaching out to the community, the other developers and project leads:
We would really appreciate it if you could help us to let the Ubuntu Unity project continue by fixing bugs, bring Unity back to a workable state as it was with 24.04 and the releases before that; and eventually keep maintaining it at least for the upcoming 26.04 LTS or until we find another solution. Maybe someone could teach us how things are done so that we can take it over in time.

fuseteam and I both want the Ubuntu Unity project to continue and keep it’s official flavor status and so does our small userbase.

Last but not least:
Please try to keep it constructive and keep the CoC in mind. We want to bring people together and work on something great. Please let us know if you are interested. :slight_smile:

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Maik -

I also push this request to the Newsletter and onto Mastodon.

-good help; hard to come by, sometimes-

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Thank you so much bashing-om, it’s really appreciated.

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I always loved Unity from the start and very glad it still exists!
Its still a great way to support touch devices in the Ubuntu community
would be sad if the project would vanish.

I wish you the best luck to find more devs & helpers!

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I suppose i should also introduce myself, for those wondering why Maik was discussing this with me:

Hi, I’m fuseteam. You may have seen me on telegram as “Tobiyo Kuujikai”, i’m also one of the team members of Ubuntu Unity. My role in this project is mainly moderation in the telegram channel and matrix channels.

I indeed currently don’t have the skills and time needed to fix the current bugs in unity, so also from me the call for help to keep this project going. We will greatly appreciate it

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Thank you for your reply and support lotuspsyche, we really appreciate it.

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In order for Ubuntu Unity to survive, it does need some people to be working towards fixing those critical bugs.

Here’s a beginner bug to fix. Ubuntu Unity is the only thing keeping the vino package in Ubuntu, but vino is unmaintained and Unity probably shouldn’t be using it any more.

One set of bugs is that many Unity specific packages are not currently buildable and show up on the latest archive rebuild. I fixed one of them, unity-settings-daemon, recently.

Another task is converting these repos (ideally with their commit history) from bzr to git.

Another task is porting Unity components away from unmaintained security-sensitive libraries: pcre3 to pcre2 (LP: #2103918 [nux]) and from libsoup2.4 to libsoup3 (LP: #2069962). I consider these porting tasks to be essential for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS since I assume the Security team would rather not have those components even in universe for the lifetime of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

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Back in 2010 Unity was the DE that brought me back to Linux. Despite my post-grad, I haven’t done any coding in a long long time, but I definitely want to take a look and see if I can help fill some gaps. I’d hate to see it fade away again.

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I have experience and I am willing to spend time towards this as Unity is still my daily desktop environment.

Another task is converting these repos (ideally with their commit history) from bzr to git.

Where would one, for example, submit these repos and any changes / fixes? It’d make sense to convert to git first, and I should be able to do it.

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Hi,
Long term Ubuntu user (and Unity user since it was UNR). Love the environment and, like others, would hate to see it go. Very limited in terms of ability (a couple of qml apps on Ubuntu Touch) but would definitely like to help with testing and also (if possible) with some documentation. I had posted build instructions a couple of years ago on the Unity Unity website forum, but I think that went west when the forum was shutdown. If there is a place I can upload documentation (or a person I can send for review) I can try to recreate those instructions?
I’m assuming that the downloads at Ubuntu Unity 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) Daily Build will be the best place for the test images?

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Testing the ISO’s and filing bug reports on Launchpad is a good place to start and really helpful. That way we can keep track on what needs to be looked after and fixed.
Any help is appreciated, from testing to filing bug reports to providing support… and the list goes on. :slight_smile:
When Beta and RC or Final releases need testing, this is the place to be: https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/

About documentation, i’ll have to look into that in the upcoming days and will get back to you on that.

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Very kind of you to jump in and help the community understand the initial steps needed to get things moving. Thanks @jbicha

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There also needs to be a plan to port Unity off Compiz and to run on Wayland somehow. Whether that is by porting it to Wayfire, writing a new system compositor with Mir, or something else altogether, something has to happen there. The existing Compiz+Nux+X11 architecture isn’t sustainable.

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Mostly an FYI, but that applies to Ubuntu 25.10 & earlier.

Ubuntu 26.04 or the resolute cycle is aiming to NOT use that site, as outlined on the discussion thread so resolute doesn’t appear at https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/ nor is it expected to.

We’re expecting to learn more about the replacement tools in the coming weeks, as the new Test Observer is still being perfected on (as I understand it)

Additional note: The ISO QA tracker is expected to be used for Ubuntu Unity 24.04.4 LTS or the updated noble point releases; that can be found there now.

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Hi! How can I get involved? I am really interested in supporting Unity Desktop with my programming, server admin and DevOps skills. I really liked this environment in Ubuntu 12.04 (I’ve been using it for around 3-4 years and then jumped on Debian with GNOME classic and XFCE) and I have very nice memories with it.
Despite not having huge amount of free time I will do my best to contribute regularly.

Could you point me please where I could find list of things to be done?

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Ah right, my bad. I totally forgot about that. Thank you for correcting and pointing us in the right direction @guiverc .

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I have on and off contact with @rs2009 and try to gather as much information as i can to point everyone in the right direction but it takes some time. The upcoming days i want to work out a plan so everything can get outlined properly. In the meantime we have to be patient because Rudra doesn’t have much time and isn’t always around. He can show me where to find everything and explain how things work.

I’ll also work on another announcement because we have some news to share. It would be great if we had a Ubuntu Unity Category in the flavors section to centralize everything a bit. I don’t know if i can create that or one of the admins or mods could look into it?

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I’ve been using Ubuntu since 9.04 and I remember the Unity years rather fondly. I’d like to help as well. I see there’s a GitLab link on the ubuntuunity.org site, so I assume that’s where the codebase lies, but unfortunately it seems that most issue tickets are rather old.

Also, fully agree with @Conan_Kudo, that if this project is to have any future at all, a compositor change is in order as soon as possible.

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Welcome. If i’m not mistaken everything takes place on Launchpad. Gitlab was used when Ubuntu Unity was a remix and not a official Ubuntu flavor in those days.

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