Review: Ubuntu Unity
Earlier this year the Unity 7 desktop, which was originally started by Canonical, celebrated its first release in a long time. The desktop environment has found a new lease on life as a community project. Back in May I tried Unity for a few days on Lubuntu to see how it would perform. The experience was largely underwhelming, but it was nice to see someone was making an effort to modernize the Unity 7 desktop environment.
In early September, I read that Ubuntu Unity, a spin of Ubuntu featuring the updated Unity desktop, may become an official community edition of Ubuntu. I was curious to see how this potential community edition would perform and set about testing the latest release.
I tried downloading the latest stable release, Ubuntu Unity 22.04.1. Once the download had completed (apparently successfully) I ran its checksum and found the download was corrupted. I erased the original ISO file, which is a little over 3GB in size, and tried downloading it again along with its checksum. The transfer was once again corrupted. I'm not sure if the published MD5 was wrong, the file was corrupted on the server, or damaged in transit. However, I decided to look for an alternative.
I next looked at the next most recent version, 20.04.5, and discovered its directory on the official Ubuntu Unity download mirror was empty. Going down through the list: 20.10 is no longer supported, 21.04 is no longer supported, 21.10 is no longer supported, and 22.04 failed its checksum again. I went back a bit further and found version 20.04.4 was available on the download mirror and the downloaded file passed its MD5 checksum. By process of elimination, this was the version I decided to install and run.
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Most of my trial with Ubuntu Unity took place just before the announcement of the new 22.10 Beta release which also let people know this spin was becoming an official community edition of Ubuntu. As a result, the bulk of this review was based on past stable releases rather than the new beta.
However, in an effort to cover all the bases, I did download the new 22.10 Beta and gave it a whirl. The packages and wallpaper have been updated. However, the same problems remain. Performance is still on the lower end of the scale and almost every time I opened the dash, Unity crashed. Often times launching a program or performing a search resulted in a crash. Adjusting the panel in the Unity settings caused a crash. Browsing directories in the Files utility caused a crash. At one point within the span of five minutes, I managed to cause three desktop crashes, bringing my exploration to a short pause each time.
I still very much like the overall design of Unity and the way everything is oriented to the upper-left corner of the display, but the state of the implementation (even in the new beta snapshot) is in a poor condition.