Wish I could help but after a hiatus of nearly 3 decades I’m only just starting tentatively to get back into coding by exploring a few modern languages before diving in to learn one or two of them fully.
It would be a shame for Ubuntu Unity to go under. While I kind of kept diving in and out of Ubuntu almost from the beginning, Unity really caught my attention and I installed it on one of my multi-boot systems by 12.04 LTS, at first using it for about 20% of the stuff I was doing. A couple of years later that had jumped up to about 30-35% and growing, and by 16.04 it became the main OS on all my systems with a 60%+ usage. Even before 18.04 came along that had reached 80%+!
What caught my attention with Unity was that for once I saw something really innovative - and ambitious - come along in Linux DEs. I now run Unity for mainly sentimental reasons, and it will always have a place somehow. Realistically, a lot of things that once were exciting and innovative, today feel somewhat dated, and I’d really like to see something truly innovative and new coming along again. But still, Unity must not disappear.
Ubuntu Unity being an official Ubuntu flavor, shouldn’t Canonical provide technical help, or at least put you in touch with people who worked on Unity when it used to be the default desktop environment, or at the very very least, relay your post on their big social network accounts ?
Hello, I daily drive Ubuntu Unity and have Ubuntu MATE on a secondary machine. Both flavours I love. Sorry to hear that Ubuntu Unity is hurting for help.
Although I cannot be a source for technical input (I am not a programmer, coder, developer, etc. – just simply a “desktop user”), I do have some writing experience and have started to write reviews for Ubuntu MATE releases on their discourse channel.
I’ve been playing around with wayfire since last month and slowly realized that it really aligns with unity experience (workspaces-layout,gestures,alt+tab view, blurring,animations and so much more)
so, I tried exploring building on top of wayfire+gtk4-layer-shell and with minimal baggage on handling compositor side of things.
well sharing a choppy screenrecord (blame yt processing, it’s smooth on my machine :p): https://youtu.be/eoUYAcf2ml0
I like the concept. Would it be possible to replicate some of the graphical effects from Unity, such as the panel and icon backgrounds changing color based on the wallpaper?
Its totally possible, I’m currently applying kawase blur for most of the UI components and if I extend it to both the top-panel and launcher, it looks like this:
For mine, i also used wayfire as the compositor but I used Qt6 instead of GTK and as you can see, since this is just an experimental project of mine, a lot of things (especially indicators and icons) are missing
If anyone is interested in this, i might post what I currently have online and continue to work on it from there
