Honestly thats the fly in the ointment right now. The ball is now in the court of Canonical Legal. I will not budge any further until I get a permission. If the community wants to create an off-Canonical distribution then it is free open source community and I wish them well.
Regards…
Edit: Some movement with CL.
Waiting for clarification. may take a little while.
There are a lot of suggestions. What we do now is wait for CL and I will post results. if results affirmative then we Poll the community about a name (we already had a quorum) but I don’t want to leave anyone out. In the mean time we can just keep testing unity-session on 18.04.
Regards…
In the mean time or even continuously ?
What I want to say is,
maybe we could consider another direction about this project. Maybe a completely separate new flavor is not needed.
What if our primary goal changed from a new flavor to maintain Unity as a desktop environment, just keeping it active and in good shape in universal repositories ?
Just a thought.
The original Primary Goal WAS to have unity-session in the universe during 18.04 cycle . Through a lot of hard work by many in the community, that has been accomplished. The idea now is for the community to maintain it. That is being done behind the scenes by many who are intimate with the unity infrastructure and also our team leader , Khurshid. The secondary goal (which I sent group mail to Khurshid and other members of unity7 maintainers) is to have unity7 stable for those who are updating from 16.04 default to 18.04 when the time comes. As a team we hope to have something prepared in a back-up mode in case things go south. So I personally have no problem being in maintenance mode. However, it did occur to me that perhaps it would not be a bad idea to have an official unity-session derivative because of unity’s unique assistive/accessibility technology that covers a larger age group demographic than perhaps some of the other distros do. It is not that I think that the unity7 maintainers should compete at all with the other flavors that are already official distros, it is just that I think it would increase the scope of a wider accessibility for all of the community at large. Because of it’s simplicity and easy maintenance it may not necessarily create a drain of any sort within the development community once that it is all set up for green to go. At least the idea of experimenting with the concept certainly seems attractive to both testers an developers alike.
In closing I would like to say … Primary Goal accomplished! A new Goal of official unity7 derivative? perhaps maybe not too far fetched as a fallback. I guess it would depend on a sustained enthusiasm from the community.
Regards…
Hi Dale, all,
The goal of becoming an official flavour is the correct route to go down in my opinion. That will get you a whole host of extra goodness for free, above and beyond somewhere to host your ISOs. For example, inclusion in the ISO tracker QA platform:
I know that @3v1n0 and @Wimpress have offered their guidance in becoming an official flavour, and I add my name to that list too.
A formal ack from legal should be forthcoming and then we can kick off the next stage in the process. It should all be fairly painless.
Thanks for caring and for all of your efforts in keeping U7 working.
Cheers, Will
Nice news, indeed!
Unity, whether had love or hate made Ubuntu known to most, especially to the non-Linux users.
Correct, but we don’t know for sure if unity-session will make it as a package when the development cycle of 18.04 ends. Do we ?
Anyway, it was just a thought. I joined this project lately so forgive my ignorance about any already accomplishments - goals.
Yes. That is correct. What I have been told is, that if unity-session causes any problems it will be pulled! Period. I have also received affirmation from a Canonical for the U+1 team to “continue to test unity-session in 18.04?” and any other persons in the community in a response to my question - as so here we are now 
If I get permissions from CL then we can go from there. We can discuss the viability of going forward.
Regards…
Just to clarify. I am a volunteer only .
Joining on! I am a very amateur/beginner programmer, but I remember trying Unity back in the original Ubuntu 11.04 release. I will help where I can.
Just a few thoughts (more or less obvious):
In terms of Design (where I take a strong interest):
Slide-out from the right is a little more modern and usable. [Credits: http://ubuntu.luxam.at/part-2-the-three-points-of-contact/]
Unity 7 is ideal for this type of concept (over GNOME), because it supports a sort of Dash already, that is far more flexible and… just, built for this sort of thing.
Very cool concept and ideas g.s.
Hopefully tweaking unity isn’t akin to insulting someone’s grandmother. Maybe with small steps like these Unity can be maintained and modernized.
Great stuff
I agree @cplate, Unity has to go somewhere other than maintanence for it to have a future (in my opinion).
Also, I don’t know WHO is doing this, but this was actually a concept that several people liked but was deleted from the conversation with many other concepts! 
I made a separate thread for theme concepts and ideas.
i have joined. And looking forward to see Unity7 on 18.04.x
Welcome to the team.
Regards…
Hi,
Just to clarify - I am still awaiting permissions to distribute from Canonical Legal so before we discuss or do any design changes on themes we have to get these ducks in a row. Gnome3+wayland is now morphing and transitioning more and more into the likeness of Unity with some new ideas and concepts embedded. It may come to a point where discussion of a venture project like Unity 9 may become a moot point ( I originally proposed that in another crossthreaded forum) but had decided that unity7 should maintain it’s current version on the advice of one of the gnome3 devs. If gnome3 default in 18.04 embeds the crux of some of the basic ideas of the work that has been done on unity then it will be a Canonical goal fulfilled. I have to stress the importance that the unity7 maintainers team is not a group that is in competition with the gnome+wayland default project currently being invested by the full resource of Canonical blessings. I had started this project on my own with no approval from Canonical nor do I represent Canonical in anyway but several persons who are from Canonical are encouraging the discussion and the project and are happy to have our QA testing of the unity-session on 18.04 during the development cycle and are willing to give us their valued advice and assistance. However , the hope still is that Unity could become and official flavor of the ubuntu family.
I must confess that the gnome3 DE is becoming more and more like unity7 and they have tamed it down to a point where it is hard to tell the difference at first glance. It must be noted that developers who previously worked and maintained the unity desktop experience are now working on the gnome3+wayland desktop experience , so , if we do get permissions to distribute , we will have our work cut out for us. Unity7 may need to be overhauled and updated to unity-9 with some new graphical effervescences but if there be any hint that we are competing with gnome3+wayland then we would have to take a step back and review our project goals. We have to remember that is was ‘air’ of competition that led to the cancellation of the unity project in the first place .
Regards…
There is an open discussion about ubuntu default theming and request for help here: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-participation-an-ubuntu-default-theme-lead-by-the-community/1545/31
Hi all,
I would like to hear some of your input on a name for unity7 distro. Please post here: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-unity7-distro-name/1634
For the sake of brevity and lessen any confusion we will use [ubuntu-unity-amd64.iso] as suggested by Khurshid. The community can still contribute at the link I provided and suggest other names.
Regards…
