Renewed Unity

Exploring the Lomiri desktop environment

- By Paul Nixer

Ubuntu's ambitious dream of convergence is alive and well in the now-independent Lomiri desktop.

In 2010, Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced an innovative new desktop system that they dubbed the Unity desktop. Unity was built to reflect Canonical's vision of convergence, which was a belief that conventional computer systems were converging with mobile devices, and a single interface that provided a similar look and feel on computers, phones, and tablets would lead to more seamless operations. Unity was the default desktop on Ubuntu through Ubuntu 17.10, but the system never really caught on. Android and iOS consolidated their hold over the mobile phone space, leaving little room for an alternative. Unity also raised some controversy with Linux users for its shopping lens feature, which collected information from users based on search results.

In the end, Unity just wasn't popular enough to continue the considerable expense of developing and maintaining it, and Canonical stepped away, returning to the Gnome desktop with Ubuntu 18.04. Many Linux users believe that was the end of Unity, but in fact, the Unity desktop lives on. A group called Unity7 continued development of the Unity 7 desktop and released a new version in 2022, although the project website does not appear to have had much activity since that Unity 7.7 release [1].

The former Unity 8 desktop, however, is still in active development. A nonprofit foundation called UBports continues to maintain the Unity 8 codebase, although the name of the desktop was changed to Lomiri in 2020 [2]. The change occurred for several reasons. For one thing, the developers wanted to avoid confusion with the Unity 3D game engine, but the new name also underscores the new status of the desktop as a project separate from Canonical. (See the box entitled “Why did Canonical Leave Unity?”)