Unity 8 Continues To Improve, But Still Has Rough Edges

Canonical's Michael Hall has shared his thoughts of trying out Unity 8 with Mir atop Ubuntu 16.04 as part of a ten-day trial.

Michael's post is entitled Dogfooding Unity 8. He shares that since last Friday he's been running Unity 8 with Mir as a ten-day experiment rather than the default Unity 7 desktop. He also shares the basic setup steps for trying Unity 8 on Ubuntu 16.04 using a PPA for those interested in giving the desktop session a whirl.

He mentions as part of his conclusion from dog-feeding Unity 8 so far, "It has been a couple of months since I last tried the Unity 8 session, back before I upgraded to Xenial, and at that time there wasn’t much working. I went into this challenge expecting it to be better, but not by much. I honestly didn’t expect to spend even a full day using it. So I was really quite surprised to find that, once I found the workarounds above, I was not only able to spend the full day in it, but I was able to do so quite easily."

Among the shortcomings he shared were that windows on Unity 8 are still currently limited to one window per app, middle-click pasting wasn't working, issues around the Software Store and traditional applications, some power management options aren't yet implemented, and other minor annoyances.

In case you missed it, it's already been confirmed that Unity 8 and Mir won't be the default of Ubuntu 16.10.