Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Saturday, September 29, 2018 at 17:08


Unity is the default desktop environment of Ubuntu for 5 years since version 11.04 up to 16.10. What's your opinion about Unity Desktop? I love it, how about you? To anticipate 18.10 on October this year, I write this tutorial to show you how to install Unity 7 on it. It's surprisingly stable enough and can live along with GNOME 3.30 on the same machine (logout to change between both). You will need to download a total of 70MB from 190 packages (noted from its Beta). Thanks to Unity7 Maintainers Team for continuing the development of Unity for Ubuntu; especially for the lead developers Beaudouin and Khurshid! Enjoy!

Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates directly.

Read also Getting Unity 7 on 18.04.

1. Install Unity


Prepare your Terminal and run this command:
$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-unity-desktop

Don't worry, it's just 70MB to download

and in the end, the Terminal will ask you to choose Display Manager...

2. Select LightDM Display manager


...like this. Use your arrow key to select "LightDM" and press Enter. In case you don't know, LightDM is the login screen you saw for 5 years on Ubuntu since 11.04 up to 16.10.



Reboot and Login


Restart your Ubuntu machine and enter the login screen. Feels like home? Feels like the old days? On the login screen, make sure to select "Unity Session" from the Ubuntu logo button (the default is already it, though). See picture below. Then, login. And, finally...

Select "Unity (Default)"

...welcome to Unity Desktop once again! Happy working!

Ubuntu Cosmic Cuttlefish with Unity Desktop

References




This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.