 It's kind of hard to believe that it's been 5 years since Canonical announced that they were switching from Unity Desktop, which was their own creation, to the GNOME Desktop, which is obviously a separate project. And it's kind of hard to believe that it's been so long ago, because it just kind of feels like yesterday, but it has been 5 years. And at that point, once they switched to GNOME, it was kind of assumed that we would never see Unity on a large Ubuntu-based distro supported by Canonical ever again. But in the last couple days, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu Unity remix, which has been around for a couple years now, is going to be the next official Ubuntu flavor. Now, there are some thoughts in my head regarding this whole thing. But mostly it comes back to the fact that Ubuntu, or specifically I guess Canonical, left Unity behind for GNOME, and now Unity is back. And it feels a little weird. So what I thought I would do today is actually take a look at the Ubuntu Unity remix, which will be the flavor in 22.10, which is just a couple months away. So this is what Ubuntu Unity remix looks like. And this is the 22.04 LTS version of the ISO. And one thing that you should know that this is running in a VM. Now I know that I promised that all my future hardware first looks or distro first looks were going to happen on hardware. But I could not for the life of me get this to be installed on hardware. I spent over an hour and a half trying to do it. And it just would not get past the, it actually wouldn't get to the partitioning part of the installer. I don't know why it just sat there and completely froze. And then it, I went through it again and it happened again. So I don't know what's going on there. Probably a hardware issue of some kind. The only other negative thing that I have to say about Ubuntu Unity remix is that the installation was very, very slow. It took about 35 minutes in the VM here. And it was also slow when I booted into the live environment on hardware. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there. But like I said, that's really the only negative stuff I have to say about this, at least so far. And I just wanted to get that stuff out of the way because there's a ton of stuff here that is really, really cool. And it leads to some questions that I have, which I'm going to ask towards the end of the video. So let's take a gander at the Unity desktop. So if you have ever used Ubuntu in the last couple of years, since they switched to GNOME, you'll know that this looks very, very familiar. This looks like Ubuntu. And you're probably wondering, Matt, you're just using Ubuntu. What's different here? Well, there are some things different here. The first thing and the most important thing that you need to know about Unity is that it has something called the hub. And that's what this thing is. Now they've tried to recreate this in GNOME with the application search thing that comes up when you hit the super key. It's not the same. So really what the hub does is it's your one stop shop for everything. It will search for applications, files, and pretty much anything on your computer. You can filter things from here. You can search from the web. You can search the web from here. Everything can happen right here at the hub. And it comes up with the super key. It is your, like I said, your one stop shop for everything on your computer. And it is probably the coolest feature of Unity. It is also the feature that a lot of people really, truly missed when Unity went bye-bye and GNOME took its place. So if you search for something in this, so let's say office, it's going to show you all your applications. And if you had documents that had office in the word, it would also show you that. You can down here at the bottom search for files and folders. So if you search for videos or something like that would show you videos. If you also searched for videos on the home part of the hub, you would get results for both applications and files and folders. So this home part is where the truly powerful part of it comes. If you want to search just for one thing, you can go to the categories or you can do all from right here from the home page. Like I said, the hub part of Unity is amazing. And I would say that the hub is probably the part of Unity that canonical misses the most because this thing is amazing. Now after that, there are some things that are interesting here. So they have a different settings panel than the GNOME version of Ubuntu. This is more of an XFC like settings panel. It has options for the appearance like so. You can change the wallpapers and the themes from here. So this is very theme-able. You can use pretty much anything you want. It would be installed just like you would in GNOME. If you want you to put it in the same spot and then it would show up here. You can mess around with behavior settings. You can choose to enable workspaces. If you do that, you get an icon in the dock that looks like this. And it will show you your virtual workspaces. The way this works on hardware is much nicer because there's nice animations and stuff that doesn't come through in a VM. So that's a little bit disappointing, but not surprising because VMs just don't do that kind of stuff. The customization here in the settings app is still very nice, but there is another thing that they include called tweaks. So this is the Unity tweak tool. And basically what this allows you to do is so much more than what the settings panel will allow you to do. So you can tweak the launcher, which is what they call this part here. You can have auto hide. You can change the transparency level. You can edit search settings, how the panel actually looks, the switcher and so on and so forth. You can also change things regarding the window manager, things like hot corners and window snapping and stuff like that. The one thing I noticed in both the VM and on hardware is that window snapping doesn't actually work. I'm not actually sure why it doesn't work, but it doesn't. So that may be just something that they're still working on or something that just doesn't work on my hardware or something who knows. You can also do more customization with themes and icons and stuff here from Unity tweak as well. One of the things that you're not seeing here that you would have if I had actually been able to install this on hardware is that just like with the newer versions of Ubuntu, in the dock or the panel or the launcher, whatever they want to call it, the drives that you have mounted are all there. And it was a mess for me because I have 12 hard drives connected to my computer and they all showed up in the dock. It was nuts. They don't need to all be there. It's really weird. I'm assuming you can probably turn that stuff off, but by default they're there and it kind of makes it all kind of messy. Unlike with GNOME and the Ubuntu version of GNOME that they use now, a lot of things here are built in that Ubuntu had to kind of tweak in order to get back. So things like icons up here at the top. When you have task icons, those things will show up here at the top. Things like icons on the desktop, that's possible with Unity as well. And really, it is a full feature little desktop. Now this all leads me to the questions that I mentioned earlier. When you take a look at Ubuntu Unity, the first thing you notice is that it looks an awful lot like the GNOME version of Ubuntu. Canonical and the Ubuntu desktop team have spent an enormous amount of time making GNOME look like Unity. A ton of time and effort and manpower and money probably. And it makes you wonder if all they wanted to do was use Unity. Why they didn't stick with Unity? Because this is actually really good. Other than the problems that I had on installing it on hardware and stuff like that, which is just because this is a very small project, it's ran by just a few developers and you're going to expect it to have problems. So that stuff can be excused. The thing is that once you look past that stuff and you use this for a little while, you realize how powerful the hub is. You realize how amazing a Unity tweak is. And that it's installed by default is really nice. You realize that the settings panel is also very well organized and is not as archaic as it might seem to be at first glance. It's really, really nice. So it makes you again wonder if Canonical has spent so much time making GNOME look like this, why they didn't just stick with this? It doesn't make much sense, right? At least it doesn't make sense to me. Now, I'm sure that there are benefits to using GNOME. I'm just not sure what those benefits are. I'm not a developer, so maybe there's something underlying that gives them the opportunity to do more things. But it feels to me like they've spent a lot of time bringing GNOME up to a usable level. They've added accent colors before GNOME did. They added dark mode before GNOME did. They added a whole bunch of extra stuff. They've made GNOME a really nice desktop environment in that it's actually usable now and fast. Before Canonical took over or started developing GNOME for themselves, GNOME was slow. It was like really, really slow and they fixed that. It's partially at least thanks to the Ubuntu guys that GNOME is usable. So I don't know what the benefits of using GNOME are. What did they gain by switching? That's just a question that I don't have the answer to and I really kind of want to know because after using this for a little while, and granted it's mostly been an alive environment and in a VM, this is really good. It's very, very good. It's obviously unpolished and I think that that unpolished part will get fixed now that it's going to be a flavor. It's going to get a lot more resources and developers working on it. So a lot of the problems that I had will go away and things like the install time and the boot up time and stuff like that. Those things will all improve now that there's going to be some resources behind it. I just don't get why this here was abandoned by Canonical. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me at all. Now I didn't take you through all the installed applications because none of that stuff really matters. The things that really mattered here were the hub and the settings and the tweak tool. So I don't really think the pre-installed applications really matter all that much. If you've ever used Ubuntu, most of them are exactly the same. You get things like LibreOffice and Firefox and stuff like that. There's not a lot here that's really different and that's because this is basically just what Ubuntu was a few years ago, but updated, right? It has a updated version of all the software that you would expect. It's just using a desktop that was abandoned by Canonical five years ago. And like I said, I'm still not sure now why they did that. Now I know at the time, Mark Shuttleworth talked about why they were doing it and some of the things that he said are still online in places, but five years later, knowing now how much work that Canonical had to do in order to make Genome look like Unity, it just makes me wonder why they didn't just continue to develop Unity. Now some of that might be because Genome has a very large community of developers and it means that Canonical is not the only development team working on the desktop. There's a whole bunch of them, not only the Ubuntu guys, but there's the Genome guys themselves and every distro that uses Genome pitches in and makes the desktop what it is. Whereas when they used Ubuntu or when they used Unity rather, they were the only ones developing it. No one else used it. It was their thing. So they were solely responsible for making it good. Personally, I think it's because they were kind of burned on the fact that the whole convergence thing never really worked. The whole idea behind Unity when it first came out was that they were going to have the same thing on the desktop and their phones. And that was going to be the convergence of two things that just that kind of idea just never really worked, right? Having one UI on both mobile and desktop never worked and Ubuntu learned that eventually. And I think that that bad experience kind of tainted their view of Unity a little bit. Maybe, I don't know. But it just kind of feels like that to me. Anyways, I'm really happy that Unity is going to be an official flavor for Ubuntu now. I think that it has the potential to be the most popular Ubuntu flavor out there. After it gets a little bit of shine in a couple of years, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes probably the most popular flavor. It probably won't be the most unpopular version of Ubuntu, because people are just going to download Ubuntu and continue to use that. But it might take over for Ubuntu or Mate, whichever one of those happens to be the most popular right now. Because it's really good. It's definitely one of those things where I really enjoyed my little bit of time working at it. The hub is amazing. So if you have thoughts on Ubuntu Unity becoming a flavor or anything on Unity, leave those comments in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. 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