 One of the questions I get asked the most from new to Linux users is hey DT if you had to choose a full desktop environment to use which one would you choose and this is a little weird for me because I've never used full desktop environments you know I've never been I've always been a standalone window manager user even when I switched to Linux on the desktop back in 2008 I always gravitated toward using standalone window managers and making my own desktop environment you know picking different components and putting it all together so I've never been a GNOME user or Plasma user XFCE user anything like that but of course I have tried them out by installing various distributions to play with and virtual machines and on friends and family computers right I've installed Linux dozens of times on other people's machines and I will say that the desktop environment that fit my workflow the most the one that I really enjoyed using like I could see myself happily living in this desktop environment forever was the old Ubuntu Unity desktop environment it really made sense to me and I was kind of sad when Canonical and Ubuntu dropped the Unity desktop environment but just because they quit using it and it's all free and open source software people can still keep developing that and that's exactly what's going on there's actually a 12 year old kid that has kept this thing alive and keeps getting updates and not only is he working on Unity this kid makes his own Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu Unity and they had a recent release of Ubuntu Unity 2204 and that's what I'm going to take a look at today so let me switch over to my desktop here and I've spun up a virtual machine here to try out a Ubuntu Unity I'm gonna run through a quick installation here so I'm just gonna go ahead and boot into the live environment I really like the artwork the logo and everything I think that's very slick and the live environment finally loaded up it took about two minutes to get into the live environment of course booting directly off the ISO is always slow you know much slower than actually running a properly installed Linux distribution but that took longer really than I would have expected let me go ahead and change the screen resolution here to 1920 by 1080 keep this configuration although it's not gonna remember it when I reboot because again this is the live environment but let's go ahead and run through a quick installation and did I not click the installer I've been waiting for about 20 seconds 30 seconds maybe yeah okay the installer finally launches yeah everything's a little slow here now this could be a virtual machine issue here I'm using the vert IO video driver and it could be that it doesn't like that particular driver maybe I should have tried a QXML there one of the other video drivers available here invert manager but let me go ahead and run through the installation English is my language so all I need to do is click continue here English us is the keyboard layout I want so I'll click continue do I want to do the normal installation or the minimal installation I typically just do the normal installations for these first look first impression videos I just want to see everything that is installed normally download updates while Ubuntu is installing yes that'll save us some time we don't have to update later and then install third-party software for graphics Wi-Fi drivers yada yada yada you always want to tick that on that gives you especially your multimedia codecs which you will need for a proper desktop experience and now let's go ahead and click continue then what do we want to do with the disk do we want to erase the whole disk and give the whole disk to Ubuntu Unity or do we want to do some partitioning you know click something else and then manually partition our drives I only have one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine and Ubuntu Unity can have the whole thing so I'm going to choose the first option erase disk and install Ubuntu then click install now we get a summary of the changes that are going to be made to the disk everything looks good I'm going to click continue we need to choose our time zone it is correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me it's chosen Chicago as the city even though I'm not in Chicago that is in the central time zone for me so I'll just leave that as is then let's create our username and password my username is going to be DT the hostname for the computer can be DT slash Unity and then let's choose a password for the DT user a strong and complicated password and then do we want to log in automatically no I want to have to enter a password to get into my computer so I'll leave that ticked off require my password to log in as ticked on by default leave that and then use active directory I don't use active directory so I'm just going to click continue and now we'll get a little slideshow this portion of the installation usually takes about five to ten minutes on my machine so I'll be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed that took about ten minutes and now to actually complete the installation restart that's what I'm going to do right now alright yeah and it launched the Unity desktop in just a couple of seconds that time is much faster now that we've actually got it properly installed of course the live environment you know was quite sluggish now the first thing I'm going to do before doing anything else is go and change the display resolution once again to 1920 by 1080 it apply it's gonna want to know if we want to keep this configuration yes and now every time I come back to this virtual machine it will remember that every time I log into Unity it should be 1920 by 1080 so first impressions this is a really beautiful desktop I've always thought Unity was rather attractive a rather gorgeous desktop environment to begin with I like the panel on the side like the icons well these are standard icons but I like the Ubuntu Unity logo icon that's really nice and what is that that's the software center I don't I don't believe I've ever seen that particular icon I'll check and see what icon set they're using in just a second and of course we have our jammy jellyfish wallpaper as well I don't know if this was created by the Ubuntu Unity team specifically for this distribution or if it's part of the wallpaper pack that ships with the flagship Ubuntu now it says software updates are ready to install now this was released April 21st and I'm taking a look at this on May 5th so I mean that's two weeks worth of updates I'm gonna go ahead and take the update and if I click okay by default it's gonna launch the software center and it's going to tell me everything that could be updated and of course Firefox has an update you would expect your web browser to be updated often for security reasons and I believe they are using the snap version of Firefox I'll take a look at that in just a second just to verify but I'm gonna go ahead and do update all and give it our strong and complicated sudo password and you can see it is updating Firefox you get a progress bar here that's a rather nice touch and you get an overall progress bar here on this button here they definitely have snaps on the system I mentioned Firefox was probably a snap I was gonna verify that but they have the snap store installed so they're definitely have snaps enabled by default I notice we have these application updates which are updating right now but then we also have requires restart OS updates the screenshot tool shot will I don't know why screenshot tool and shot will require rebooting after the update but let's go ahead and well I don't know if it actually updated anything or maybe it's gonna update during the reboot process now it just takes us right back to the login manager so I don't think it actually updated those programs that it said it would update let me launch the software center again and I've been waiting for about 15 20 seconds it says it's loading updates I'm assuming it's maybe doing a sync of the repositories or something but it's taking a little bit of time here this is one of what I considered the disadvantages sometimes of using these graphical applications where if I was doing an update at the terminal you know the terminal would actually give me some information about what's going on because right now I don't know if it's still actually running update or if this program is crashed or you know what's really going on but I usually don't use the graphical software center and I figured I would actually use it this time just to change things up on the video all right so it finally yeah that took like a minute whatever it was doing but yeah I still have these updates maybe I have to do them one at a time if I click on OS updates okay yeah then I get a old like little submenu of all the various things that need to be updated a lot of libraries so how do I actually update them I thought restart and update would have taken care of them but there's in this little pop-up window there's nothing to do here unless I click on them one at a time but no there's nothing to do even for that yeah I'm just not sure how to use this this is actually confusing it would be simpler to do this at the terminal I think let me do control all T to bring up a terminal that's how you bring up a terminal in a boon to and a boon to base distributions and then let me zoom in here and let's just do a sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade and you see the following packages will be updated base files and the various libraries that we saw in that pop-up window but I didn't really have a way to update them at least I didn't see in the GUI but at the terminal you know it's a simple yes or no question do you want to update them and they get updated all right so we have all of those installed and updated now let me run a snap list just to verify that snaps are installed and that we have a few already installed on the system besides this window and it looks like yeah we have Firefox as a snap so and the snap store and then you know various other core snap stuff but really the only snap that's installed is Firefox is installed as a snap pack now let me do an apt space list space dash dash installed and get a list of all the packages that are installed through the apt package manager line by line each packages on its individual line which makes it rather easy to get a count because then all you have to do is take that same command pipe it into WC the word count program space dash L for I want a line count so there were 1840 lines in this output here which means they were 1840 packages installed via the apt package manager for those wondering about the kernel let's do a U name dash R it's using of the same kernel I believe that all the other Ubuntu flavors are using 5.15.0 now for those of you wondering about flat pack support if I do a where is flat pack because if something is installed on the system where is command will tell you where the binary is where the libraries are where the man page is so where is flat pack flat pack is installed because we have a binary user been flat pack and then we have the man page and user share man yada yada yada so flat pack is installed or they're actually any flat packs installed like individual flat packs let's do a flat pack list there are not so flat pack is installed it's ready to go but none or installed out of the box for you but it is available I wonder if that's integrated in the software center I go into the software center and let's see go to this hamburger menu software repositories and it took about 10 15 seconds for that window to come up software repositories and let's see other software now that's not yet updates authentication additional drivers this is where you would get your proprietary video drivers Wi-Fi drivers things like that where is so flat pack is installed but I guess they haven't actually added a flat hub as a repository yeah I thought I would see some kind of checkbox or something for the flat hub repository let me just close this window and let me just search for something I know is available as a flat pack so if I search for discord discord proprietary software so it's not going to be in the standard Debbie in repositories it's not going to be available through apt install right but discord being proprietary software you can package it in these third party repositories for snaps flat packs so if I click on discord we have an install button but it should tell me somewhere where is it actually getting it from what repository all right here source flat hub so flat hub is enabled okay so it's ready to go out of the box it just wasn't in this here at least I didn't see it I go to about software this is software 41.5 of course that is the GNOME software center and let me close that now let me get into the unity dash here so if I hit super it should just bring up our application launcher and for those of you that are not familiar with the way unity works you have your standard applications kind of menu or you could search for something here you have filter results and you see applications files and folders at the bottom here you have these you can think of them as tabs and unity they called them I believe they called them scopes where the idea was you had scopes and lenses I believe the filters were the lenses and these were the scopes or maybe I got that reverse but anyway if I click on this and of course there's key bindings to change through these as well you can see this is search applications and this one here is search files and folders this one with the movie icon of course would search your videos directory I'm assuming and then this would search your music directory and the photo icon would search your photos directory go back to the home here or actually let's go to the applications and what I want to do is gonna do installed applications and it just shows you like the last six that you'd probably opened I haven't really opened anything but I'm gonna click see fifty six more results and this should give us all of the applications and if I make this full screen you see how we have our windows controls here you have the close minimize maximize let's maximize this so you guys can see all the applications installed and it looks like we have for the most part the same packages installed in Ubuntu Unity as standard Ubuntu with some notable exceptions because I do notice they swap out the default PDF viewer the document viewer which in GNOME is events but they are using Atrial which I believe is one of the Matei tools and then I notice I of Matei is their image viewer rather than I of GNOME right so they've swapped out a few tools you know of the GNOME tools for the corresponding Matei tools pluma is our text editor let's take a look at pluma pluma is a old fork of g-edit and back when you know it's Matei forked it basically when Matei came about because Matei is a fork of GNOME too essentially and let's get back into the full screen dashboard here one thing I do notice looking at the icons here we have some icons that are unusually large right then the sizes are not consistent and I notice one of them is Firefox Firefox being installed as a snap I'm assuming the snap package is installed or causing that issue there and then we log out shut down reboot the session icons they're just probably just unusual icons they're typically not something you see in application menus so maybe that's why they're a little weird now one thing I did notice if I hit the super key to get out of this menu you know we have our quick launchers here which is just the quick launcher to get you know back into that that dash right but we have three LibreOffice icons I mean who uses LibreOffice that often that I mean that's gonna be the only quick launchers you have there's there's other much more important programs to have here for example I'm a little surprised and let's go to the applications menu we're gonna add some stuff I'm a little surprised like everyone needs a browser like that's by far the most important application you should probably have Firefox as a launcher and honestly you probably should have your file manager as a launcher most people are gonna need that eventually just to make things you know a little easier to get to and of course for me I wouldn't do this out of the box but for me just in case I need it later I'm gonna have a quick launcher for the terminal even though I know control alt T brings up a terminal in Ubuntu some of the applications that are installed rhythm box of course is the standard music player in GNOME and it's pretty fantastic I I'm glad they didn't swap that out for something else this is rhythm box three dot four dot four really awesome music player now one of the things to get used to for those of you new to Unity the we do have a situation where when you're full screen well when you're not full screen your window controls are always on the left side of the window and this makes sense I'll explain why here in just a second but your window controls are always on the left side of the toolbar when you maximize you know your window decorations go away because you really don't need them but if you want them if you roll over the title here in the bar you can get them so you can un-maximize or close or minimize whatever it is you want to do there is a minimize by the way if I minimize it goes down here into the dock here and you can un-minimize by clicking on it so why are the window decoration buttons here on the left hand side of the window well that's where they should be one of the things about UI design that most desktop environments get wrong with the exception of Unity and with the exception of Mac OS is the window decorations need to be on the left side of the window because you don't want people to have to move the mouse a lot the worst thing for hand paint and wrist paint for those of you that sit at a computer all day and I noticed this with my wrist is having to move that dang mouse and it doesn't make sense to have you know your window decorations on the right hand side of a window for example let me go down here if these window decorations were here you know so much in your windows happens on the left hand side of the window right so like in rhythm box here even like we got this left hand pain where you navigate stuff typically navigation stuff is on the left hand side of the windows right your back arrows forward arrows things like that if you had a URL bar or something think about Firefox here let's launch the Firefox snap for the first time which the first time I know it's gonna be a little slow and it wasn't too bad let's make that full screen when you make a browser full screen right everything happens on the left hand side right you got your arrow buttons and the refresh and your tabs they start tabbing here on the left hand everything's here don't put the window controls all the way over to the right right have them right here have everything right here where is the launcher to get into the the dash for unity right here right there everything is in this one little corner there's very little travel you never want to do anything UI related that forces the user with their mouse have to go to the right hand side of the screen or to the bottom right make everything top left or it's top left as you can get it that just makes sense I maybe it doesn't I know a lot of people do things for aesthetics but there's more than aesthetics involved here you're really you can actually damage people's hands permanently if you don't design your UIs appropriately so let's open up the file manager and see if they're using GNOME's Nautilus file manager they are I can already tell that's Nautilus plus the name of your files now watch what happens when I hover over files you get a global menu right the menu that is normally you know file edit view that's normally in your windows they use a Mac OS 10 like global menu this is called a global menu where the menu is integrated into the top bar I think that makes sense it saves space because honestly if you had a bunch of windows open and had all of them have this extra line with file edit view no you don't need all that just the one that has focus it's file edit view menu goes up into the bar makes a lot of sense most people have their windows full screen any window they're working in they typically have it full screen or they have them in a grid where you know you snap to one side well that didn't quite work in this VM but it should snap if I release it correctly you know maybe I have the terminal here and let's see if I can snap that so you know you've got the terminal menu here and then if I go over to home into the file manager that's its menu and I think that is the smart way to do this now let me go back into the global menu here for Nautilus and see what version they're using out that's not Nautilus that's Nemo so that is Nemo 5.2.4 and the reason I thought that was Nautilus is because Nemo is kind of a fork of an older version of Nautilus that's why they look so similar but this is Nemo so another Mate application right so there they've swapped out many things for the Mate applications rather than the GNOME applications and Nemo is one of those choices I think make sense because honestly Nautilus isn't a great file manager Nemo is actually a better choice as far as some of the other choices they made like a PDF viewer and the image viewer I mean one is as good as the other pluma versus G edit yeah they're all about the same but I do appreciate that they swapped out Nautilus for Nemo I think that's a smart decision now let me hit super and I know there is a tweak tool unity tweak so let me go ahead and open this and this is kind of like our control panel here if I made that full screen and you can't make it full screen it's got a fixed position so double clicking on it doesn't do anything and then let's go into the unity subsection because I think most people probably will be a little put off by how big the launcher is by default now in the older versions of unity or the versions that are not part of the Ubuntu Unity remix distribution we're looking at this actually used to be much bigger they used to have a default icon size 64 and now they're using 48 which I think makes a lot of sense honestly I'd drop that down to about 32 I think for me personally auto hide is turned off by default but if you want to you can take that on auto hide means when the window is over here you know this panel should disappear but it is not doing that maybe we haven't saved this yet because the icon size did not change either let's see there's no button to save maybe just leaving all of that maybe it'll change when I close out no so that actually did not do what I thought it was going to do see does it remember our choices yeah icon size 32 but that is definitely bigger than 32 and it's definitely not auto hiding if it auto hide means when the window gets on the panel the panel should go away right so it doesn't cover up our window we're working in I wonder if it would remember it if I logged out and logged back in so let's do a log out when I log out and log back in still the same same 48 pixel wide bar instead of the 32 pixel wide bar so I don't know maybe this isn't the launcher maybe this is the panel the panel menu this one know because it's talking about menus they're talking about this here I don't want to really play with that I wanted this launcher left side launcher top level proven we have a transparency level let's see if adjusting that does anything it's hard to tell with this wallpaper can't tell if it actually does anything or not let's change the wallpaper I'm gonna right click change desktop background let's pick a busier wallpaper something it's got a lot going on here let's just pick this nature photograph because I'll be able to see the grass and all from the transparency when I make this thing fully transparent or is that fully opaque I think that's fully opaque let's make it fully transparent still nothing going on I'm assuming this is a compositing problem and again it could be a VM problem could just be the the driver the video driver I'm using in the VM but it doesn't look like really it doesn't look like anything I'm doing in the Unity tweak tool is working so I'm not sure let me launch it with the terminal so let me show you how to debug something or at least get an idea of what was going on if you run something from the terminal you know you'll actually get some error messages hopefully when things are going wrong so changing all of that I've changed a lot of stuff color based on wallpaper yada yada yada auto hide I had changed auto hide before and it went back to the default setting restore defaults just goes back to the default settings I don't want to do that yeah I don't know why this isn't changing it doesn't look like the tweak tool at least the launcher doesn't look like it's doing anything let's see transparency level for the panel this is the top panel yeah and the transparency is not working for it either I wouldn't expect it to date and time 12 hour time and 24 hour time I actually like 24 hour time which is what it's set to so that's fine include seconds let's see yeah that changes so some things working here but for whatever reason the launcher here I don't know why the launcher yeah I don't know why none of this is being respected yeah I'm a little concerned about that because the transparency issue I understand that's a video driver issue but just being able to change the size of the panel and also toggling on auto hide that has nothing to do with the video driver that should that stuff should just work so maybe there are some other settings managers for this let's go into the standard system settings tool you know like your GNOME system settings tool let's see this is the wallpaper and this is the standard wallpaper pack from a boon to it looks like it does have some extra stuff because I don't think I've seen some of these really colorful jellyfish now those are kind of neat wallpapers a little bit too busy a little too colorful for me got a little bit too much going on be a little distracting for me I think I'm just gonna go with the default nice simple clean let me go back to all settings and the other settings are yeah just standard stuff here nothing unity related all the unity related stuff should have been in the tweak tool the unity tweak tool so and of course it's not really working for me Thunderbird by the way is available for an email client I go back into the all the installed applications VLC is our movie player and again that's probably another situation where the default GNOME video player just isn't good enough I actually think that's a smart decision just get rid of the GNOME video player and swap it out for VLC I think many users are probably gonna install VLC anyway it makes sense just to go ahead and install it let me open a terminal again so I'm gonna do control alt T zoom in is each top installed out of the box no it's not it's not installed out of the box on standard Ubuntu either so let's go ahead and check system resource usage and we are using one gig of RAM out of the six gigs of RAM I gave this virtual machine and that's pretty normal pretty normal for a GNOME desktop environment pretty normal for unity although unity typically is a little lighter I've done a lot of stuff here in the last few minutes though opening a lot of programs so that may be a little higher than what it typically would be like on a cold boot not really using any CPU but it shouldn't be using any CPU we're not really doing anything here in this VM at the moment some other programs that mainline Ubuntu never installs is VIM installed VIM is not installed is get installed get is not installed I have real issues with mainline Ubuntu not installing VIM get and each top I think those three programs are programs most like the overwhelming majority of users probably eventually gonna install those programs just install them out of the box Ubuntu I will say with unity it is a nice blast from the past because I did enjoy you know playing with this desktop environment in years past one thing to note the super key of course brings up your dash here the super key if you hold it you get the key bindings because there are a lot of key bindings that do various things unity is very keyboard driven if you want it to be and that's why I liked it because I never had to touch the mouse it was almost like a tiling window meant it's not like a tiling window manager but you could do a lot simply from the keyboard you never really had to touch the mouse that much so you hold the super key you get you get your key bindings you also get over here I don't know if you guys can see that one two three four five six seven eight right so it numbers the application so super one is going to launch the first thing in the panel which of course is Firefox super two would launch the file manager Nemo so if I just do super two you know if I didn't know what number it is if I just hold super it'll tell me but usually you can get a pretty good guess just by looking at it right you know you know super two is the file manager super three is the terminal and of course if you never move your launchers you will quickly learn exactly what the numbers are anyway because they'll never change unless you rearrange things some other useful key bindings if you do the super key to get into the dash and you do control tab you can tab through the various scopes you know the various tabs at the bottom so that is rather nice to so I'm very happy that unity as a desktop environment lives on I'm very happy that this Ubuntu Unity remix lives on because I know a lot of Ubuntu users millions of Ubuntu users were disappointed when unity went away a lot of them were very upset and hopefully this project alleviates some of those people's anger so one thing I will say that the sub into unity remix it looks good and it seems okay I will say now I look at it in a VM you never want to judge anything in a VM but I will say that there were some real slow sluggish things going on applications that took forever to load I don't know what the problem with that was could be video driver problems the fact that the unity tweak tool didn't seem to work and a lot of the settings that didn't seem to work and that I don't think have anything to do with the video driver that I'm using in this VM so I don't know what that is I don't know if these are known bugs are not overall though I'm very happy that this project exists and I will definitely keep taking a look at it in future editions now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of the show Devin Gabe James Maxim met Michael Mitchell Paul Scott West Allen armor dragon Chuck commander and a day okay Dylan George Lee Linux Ninja Mike hurry on Alexander B's arch and the door probably take realities for less Red Prophet Steven and Willie these guys they're my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys this first look at a boon to unity 20204 would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen on these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace now we just need a arch unity remix