call for unity7 testing, maintainers

[ventrical]

Hi All,

To keep unity7 viable we have to test it alongside GNOME and report any breakage.

Also it has been brought to my attention that unity7 may break throughout the current development version, specifically, as mentioned here,

Hi Dale, Mark,

Just to add a little more background here:



Unity 7 in 16.04 LTS will naturally be supported until 2021 by the Desktop team with security updates and critical bug fixes. These would very likely be forward-portable to Unity 7 in 17.04, 17.10 etc.


The problems for U7 arise in 17.10 and beyond because of the way we have patched the Gtk libraries & apps to get them to integrate well with Unity 7. For example, we patch out header bars and client side decorations & patch in support for the global menus. This are fundamentally incompatible with GNOME Shell, and so we need to make a decision about whether to add more patches to make these apps work well in both Unity 7 and GNOME Shell or drop the patches and focus on the GNOME Shell experience. The current preference is drop the patches.


There are some other incompatibilities in the desktop session between GNOME Settings Daemon & Unity Settings Daemon, or GNOME Online Accounts & Ubuntu Online Accounts. We need to use the GNOME version in the GNOME session, so these would be prime candidates for a community team to maintain in the future for the U7 session.


Where does this leave Unity 7 in 17.10 then? At the moment we are testing Unity 7 alongside GNOME Shell to spot when something we land causes Unity 7 to break. While we can probably work around some of these issues, the overall experience will be hampered by the incompatibility between our U7 patches & services and GNOME Shell, and this will, unfortunately, degrade the U7 experience on 17.10. We're still looking at what changes could be made to keep U7 working in the archive so I can't make any promises of functionality yet. I'd like to make that call before Beta 1 so people know what to expect.


Any community teams who'd be interested in helping out with that would be very welcome and I'd be very happy to help get them set up with the access they need and support from the Desktop Team.


Cheers, Will

So anyone who would like to be part of this testing or has experience in the areas, as which Will is pointing out, then please join in the discussion here. If we contribute to the community effort it could help ensure unity7's viability in the 18.04 release cycle.

Regards..
Dale

[kc1di]

Will unity 7 play with wayland which seems to be what will be the coming default x server?

[ventrical]

Will unity 7 play with wayland which seems to be what will be the coming default x server?

I did a lot of testing of wayland in the early days. Then mir came along and I tested that too. Well .. the rest of the story is just re-hashing old ground. You asked a good question and I think you hit the nail on the head. But, what if we brainstorm, I mean , perhaps we can build a simple roll-back compositor to handle unity7 when it is logged into without affecting system resources too much. Or can unity7 be made into a snap? Or perhaps we can modify unity7 to become a 'unity7classic' rollback. Could we possibly jockey compositors? For example stay x11 while wayland is running and stay wayland while x11 is running concurrently? So it would be like two impermeable sandboxes not affecting each other - a filter developed capable of doing that. Or we can have dynamic-depends that have a global code but are filterable and intuitive. or perhaps unity-greeter or the entire login process can be modified to insert unity7 into a container running on a rolled back x11 with legacy compatible depends? There is nothing wrong with using older reliable code in newer conceptuals if you can simply teach the new core to read the older code. It doesn't always have to be bare metal forensics to make a doable and workable multi-purpose compositor, does it?

Regards..

[amano]

I like the idea with the Unity 7 Snap. Probably the only viable way to get the supported 16.4 Unity to 18.4.

[Yahoé]

As of this morning 2017-06-20 after dist-upgrading my system which, removed ubuntu-session, upon restart, I cannot access the Gnome session. Since I had to have a desktop environment, I reinstalled ubuntu-session which reinstalled some unitygtk2 packages, I think. Anyhow, I now can load Unity, but the display is acting up on me.

[Frogs Hair]

As of this morning 2017-06-20 after dist-upgrading my system which, removed ubuntu-session, upon restart, I cannot access the Gnome session. Since I had to have a desktop environment, I reinstalled ubuntu-session which reinstalled some unitygtk2 packages, I think. Anyhow, I now can load Unity, but the display is acting up on me.

I have a fully functional unity session after removal of this package though it is no longer listed as default in the greeter.

[ventrical]

I have a fully functional unity session after removal of this package though it is no longer listed as default in the greeter.

If you installed unity7 alongside a 17.10 artful-desktop install then unity would never have been default. Is your install an upgrade from 17.04?

regards..

[Yahoé]

Yes it's an 17.04 upgrade.

[ventrical]

As of this morning 2017-06-20 after dist-upgrading my system which, removed ubuntu-session, upon restart, I cannot access the Gnome session. Since I had to have a desktop environment, I reinstalled ubuntu-session which reinstalled some unitygtk2 packages, I think. Anyhow, I now can load Unity, but the display is acting up on me.

Yep .. my ubuntu is gone!!

Nope .. you have to hit the back arrow in the greeter and there is unity

Unity is gone. It rolls right to gnome-shell.

Regards..

[ventrical]

OK.. so I reinstalled ubuntu-session

ventrical@ventrical-MS-7850:~$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-session
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  evolution-data-server-online-accounts libcamel-1.2-59 libdbusmenu-qt5
  libebook-1.2-16 libgsettings-qt1 libqt5sql5 libqt5sql5-sqlite libsigsegv2
  libunity-gtk2-parser0 libunity-gtk3-parser0
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  hud unity-gtk-module-common unity-gtk2-module unity-gtk3-module
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ubuntu-session
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/2,820 B of archives.
After this operation, 1,136 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 147709 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing hud (14.10+17.10.20170619-0ubuntu1) ...
Removing unity-gtk2-module:amd64 (0.0.0+17.04.20170918-0ubuntu1) ...
Removing unity-gtk3-module:amd64 (0.0.0+17.04.20170918-0ubuntu1) ...
Removing unity-gtk-module-common (0.0.0+17.04.20170918-0ubuntu1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package ubuntu-session.
(Reading database ... 147679 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../ubuntu-session_3.24.1-0ubuntu2_all.deb ...
Unpacking ubuntu-session (3.24.1-0ubuntu2) ...
Processing triggers for libglib2.0-0:amd64 (2.53.1-1) ...
Setting up ubuntu-session (3.24.1-0ubuntu2) ...
ventrical@ventrical-MS-7850:~$