Restarting Unity development in 2021 - Progress Report

Just chiming in to see exciting times ahead and best of luck with the project. Have you thought of going wayland-only going forward and remove yourself from the burden of maintaining both systems? X is basically dead and unmaintained at this point and only Xwayland is getting any love.

X or Xorg is not dead and unmaintained, it’s latest stable release was December 1st 2020.

You might be interested in wayfire https://wayfire.org/ which described as:

“Wayfire is a 3D Wayland compositor, inspired by Compiz and based on wlroots.”

So pretty cool stuff. Unless MIR has feature parity with wayfire (I’d love to see what mir can do) so that would be interesting to see

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That was before Xwayland was extricated from X.org, which it is now. I would not expect many more releases and certainly never a 1.21 version.

I am interested to help developing UnityX. I submitted a join arequest.

Thank you

2021-05-07: RC 1

  • Includes a new panel.
  • Has a new settings utility.
  • Includes many more keyboard shortcuts.
  • Rewritten in Fish (and partly in Python3).

We need your feedback/suggestions to improve UnityX. You can report any bugs on the issue tracker here and can send your suggestions on this thread.

Information

Download link: https://unityx.org/deb.zip
GitLab release: [https://gitlab.com/unity-x/unityx/-/releases/10.0-rc1]

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Hello ! First of all, this is really good to see a new project about Unity :slight_smile: Definitely my favorite DE so far.
For UnityX, do you have the plan to “simply” (i hate this word, because this is clearly not a simple task do to…) remade Unity 7 under vala (and other technologies) or do you have plans to add new features like i a new file manager, and so on ?

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Will UnityX include Nemo, or the window search?

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Nemo is IMO the best file manager on Linux right now. I’d love to see it paired with Unity

Ubuntu Unity Remix with Unity 7 uses Nemo already. :slight_smile:

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Will there be an Left Panel like In Unity 7 or 8?
It feels weird this one not having it since the other 2 iterations had it

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2021-07-26

The desktop icons (nemo-desktop) have been replaced with widgets (conky).

2021-08-01: side app-launcher

A new app launcher has been added (with a similar style to that of Lomiri). Here’s a screenshot of the new app launcher and widgets.

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2021-08-02: RC 2

  • Includes a new sidebar design for the application launcher and the opened apps view.
  • Added widgets.
  • Added system notifications.
  • Added tray icons.
  • The separate WiFi, Bluetooth and PulseAudio programs have been replaced with tray icons.
  • The application launcher and ‘opened apps’ shortcuts have been moved into the panel.
  • Added logout button.
  • Added time next to date.

Release

Download link: https://unityx.org/deb.zip
GitLab release: https://gitlab.com/unity-x/unityx/-/releases/10.0-rc2

Screenshots

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Looking good matey! Good work so far.

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UnityX 10.0-rc3 has now been released. The HUD has been added to UnityX and it works with multiple apps at the same time and even with GNOME apps such as Nautilus and Builder, among other changes. Here’s how to install it, along with the release notes: https://docs.unityx.org/releases/10.0-

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Hi everyone, following the ‘Hacking on UnityX and Unity7’ on Ubuntu OnAir (https://youtu.be/vZGge7xs290), we’re now releasing the changes made to UnityX during the session as rc4. It includes unity-control-center from Unity7 and a new logout dialog among other features.

Release notes (everything we did in the session): https://docs.unityx.org/releases/10.0-rc4

  1. Manage config with gsettings (using the schemas used by Unity7).
  2. Use unity-control-center.
  3. Make custom panels for unity-control-center specific to UnityX.
  4. Change background without having to log out and log in.
  5. Add polkit authentication agent (polkit-gnome).
  6. Export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.
  7. Add new log out dialog.
  8. Add suspend, shutdown, reboot and log out.
  9. Fix bug preventing launching testing/window from launching outside the unityx directory.

And many other tiny bugs :slight_smile:

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2021-08-22: UnityX APT repo

A new APT repository has been set up for UnityX (which includes the latest versions of UnityX).

Here are the steps to install UnityX with the new APT repo: https://docs.unityx.org/installation

Hey mate, can show us the final looks of UnityX ?

The look-and-feel has not yet been finalized, but you’ll find a screenshot of its current state above.

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