The first fork of Unity 8 is now available for Ubuntu 16.04

Within a few hours of announcing the closure of the Ubuntu Phone and Unity 8 projects, several developers started the respective forks and developments so that the Ubuntu Community would not be left without it. We already know what is happening about Ubuntu Phone, but what about Unity 8?

About Unity 8 we know that a developer named John Salatas has taken care of creating a fork called Yunit. This Yunit or Unity 8 is based on Ubuntu developments but even though we don't have the final desktop yet, yes we have developments of what will be the next Unity 8 or rather Yunit.

Yunit will be the new name of Unity 8 although it will remain the same

Salatas has recently released an external repository for Ubuntu that we can use to install Yunit as the main desktop. Although sadly, this desktop is not stable yet so we cannot use it for production teams.

This repository supports Ubuntu 16.04, the LTS version of Ubuntu. And it cannot be used on Kubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu MATE either. The reason for this is that I use QT libraries that are too old to use Yunit.

In any case, if we want to install Yunit on our Ubuntu, because we comply with it, we have to open a terminal and write the following:

wget -qO - https://archive.yunit.io/yunit.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add
echo 'deb [arch=amd64] http://archive.yunit.io/ubuntu/ xenial main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yunit.list
echo 'deb-src http://archive.yunit.io/ubuntu/ xenial main' | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yunit.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install yunit-desktop

This will start Yunit Desktop installation on our Ubuntu. During the installation it will ask us for LightDM, we click that we do want it as a session manager and that's it. We already have Yunit Desktop as a desktop in our Ubuntu. Now, remember that Yunit is still a desktop in development, which means that it can cause serious errors and even not work. But as a basis for a future desktop it is not bad Don't you think so?