Last summer, Rudra Saraswat, the young developer who set out to resurrect the desktop that Canonical left for dead so long ago, He launched its first major update in six years. In parallel, he was also working on what he called UnityX, a graphical environment that was halfway between the Unity we know and the Lomiri used by Ubuntu Touch. Now, in something that seems to have its feet a little more on the ground, has presented Unity 7.7, or rather part of what is preparing for that version.
It seems that Saraswat likes what they are doing in UBports, although it seems that they are partly following the path set by Canonical back in the day. It is not the first thing he mentions in his post, but it is what he calls the most attention, since the Dash is one of the most identifying components of Unity. Until now, the "app drawer" of the graphical environment is very similar to what we saw back in 2010: it comes out horizontally and stays in the upper left corner. Unity Dash 7.7 it will come out like Lomiri's, from the left, but taking up all the space from top to bottom.
UWidgets, widgets in Unity 7.7
On the other hand, he has also presented what he has called as UWidgets, a system that will allow you to display widgets, similar to Cinnamon's desklets, and they are written in Python. They can be downloaded and copied to the folder ~/.local/share/unity/widgets to install them. They already have many prepared, such as a clock, a system monitor, one for Spotify... And the number will only increase.
But that's not all: the UWidgets libraries also allow widgets to modify the appearance and settings of Unity7 and do all kinds of fancy things: for example, it allows them to change the wallpaper or the position and other settings of the dock/ pitcher. Additionally, many of its libraries can be used in existing applications written for Unity, to integrate with the desktop. I'm even thinking of using UWidgets to rewrite a lot of the unity-tweak-tool code.
In addition, they are setting up a store/repository for the UWidgets, where you can upload widgets created by the community or download what is there.
Unity 7.7 will have a new splash screen, and it will be written in Flutter. Other changes will be seen in the panel, the new one being a little bigger, but it will look much better. As for notifications, there was already an indicator in the past, but the new one has received love and will improve the user experience.
As for other less outstanding novelties, the launcher BFB has been replaced by a semi-transparent icon, similar to the Ubuntu Unity 21.04 launcher BFB, the size of the default launcher icon has been reduced to 44, the user interface of the user center has been improved. control and reduced panel opacity to 0.75.
Changes that have yet to be confirmed
Unity developers have already submitted their proposals, but they have yet to be fully implemented, and something could change if the community doesn't like it. The truth is that a lot of what they've done has been done away with stuff that was in Canonical's draft before he left the desktop he designed, so Unity fans are sure to like the mods. If someone wants to give his opinion, Saraswat invites us to do so on his channels Telegram o Discord.