Ubuntu Unity For Linux

The hype surround Ubuntu Unity's becoming an official Ubuntu flavor have somewhat dimmed down since October 2022, when Ubuntu Unity 22.10 was released.

Here we are a couple of months later, and Ubuntu Unity 23.04 Lunar Lobster is here to pave the way forward. Since Ubuntu 23.04 is one of the biggest (and probably most successful interim releases in the last few years), that's good new for every other Ubuntu flavor in the family, including Ubuntu Unity.

The biggest piece of news is that Ubuntu Unity 23.04 is the first distribution to ship Unity 7.7 out-of-the-box. As expected, there are a lot of improvements and changes.

For starters, there's a brand-new dash which is bound to hit that nostalgia sweet spot for users who loved Ubuntu 16.04. There's also a new panel that's not only bigger in size, but it's also translucent by default.

Another big change is the fact that indicator-notification is installed by default. This means that users are now able to see any notification that may have appeared while they were away.

Ubuntu Unity 23.04 also features support for new in-Dash widgets (the official widget implementation is called UWidgets) and a store for downloading and managing the new widgets is currently in the works.

There are a few small changes as well and these include some UI tweaks for the BFB launcher (which is now half-transparent), and the Settings app's appearance has also been improved.

As far as core apps are concerned, nothing new of special here. You get Firefox 111, Thunderbird 102, LibreOffice 7.5, Python 3.11, GCC 13, GlibC 2.37, Ruby 3.1, golang 1.2, and LLVM 16.

The 23.04 release of Ubuntu Unity is an relatively small one (at least when compared to other well-established Ubuntu flavor releases), but the changes are more than welcome.

23.04 does a good job at slowly but surely bringing Ubuntu's former desktop environment into the limelight, and that is not easy job. The future is shapping up to be quite good for Ubuntu Unity, and we're most definitely looking forward to the next release (especially the next LTS release).