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I'm thinking to reinstall Ubuntu on my machine and would love to have Unity back.

I can't get used to Gnome.

What is the best way to get Unity back on the recent releases of Ubuntu?

Or is there an alternative to Unity?

The feature I miss the most is the Alt search for a menu item.

Ionică Bizău
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    @pomsky Is Unity still maintained? – Ionică Bizău Mar 11 '19 at 10:01
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    @IonicăBizău From Wikipedia: On 5 April 2017 Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical's work on Unity would end and that Ubuntu would employ the GNOME 3 desktop instead. However, the UBports team forked the Unity 8 repository and continued the development. Currently, the Unity 8 project is maintained and developed by UBports. – Kulfy Mar 11 '19 at 10:47
  • alt + F2 [usually] opens a prompt that will allow you to search or run commands and programs. – Starbuck Mar 12 '19 at 15:23

1 Answers1

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Going back to Unity

If you have been using Unity or GNOME in the past, you may not like the new customized GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 18.04. Ubuntu has customized GNOME so that it resembles Unity but at the end of the day, it is neither completely Unity nor completely GNOME.

Open up a terminal window. Then run the following two commands to install Unity 7 desktop from the default software repository.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ubuntu-unity-desktop

This will install a lot of packages. Once the installation is complete, restart your Ubuntu 18.04 computer.

You can also install Unity Tweaks via the Software Center or you can use the command below to install it:

$ sudo apt install unity-tweak-tool

How to Install Unity Desktop on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS?

  1. Open up a terminal window. Then run the following two commands to install Unity 7 desktop from the default software repository.

    $ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ubuntu-unity-desktop

    This will install a lot of packages. Hit Enter to continue.

  2. During the installation, you will be asked to choose a display manager. You can choose lightdm display manager, which will give you the Unity Login screen. gdm3 is the default display manager for GNOME desktop.

    enter image description here

    Note:

    a) Use ↑or↓ to position the cursor on your choice of default desktop manager
    b) Hit Spacebar to mark your selection (Don't ignore this step).
    c) Use Tab to navigate to OK button and press Return.

  3. Once the installation is complete, restart your Ubuntu 18.04 computer.

    $ sudo shutdown -r now

  4. Now you are greeted by Unity login screen. What a warm feeling to have it back!

    Double-click Ubuntu symbol in LightDM or gear symbol in GDM to display options for desktop environments.

    enter image description here

    The default desktop environment is now Unity. You can click the Ubuntu icon to choose another desktop environment if you want to.

    enter image description here

  5. If you upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04/17.10 to Ubuntu 18.04 and the login screen was replaced with the one from GNOME desktop, you can restore Unity login screen by running the following command:

    $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

    And here’s the good old Unity desktop.

    enter image description here

  6. Checking Unity Version

    You can use the screenfetch tool to check Unity desktop version.

    $ sudo apt install screenfetch

    enter image description here

    Now, give the following useful command to display not only version info, but also other system details:

    $ screenfetch

    enter image description here

    As you can see, we have installed Unity 7.5.0.

    You can also acquire Unity version by running the following command.

    $ unity --version

    enter image description here

    Since we installed Unity, why not install the Unity tweak tool?

    $ sudo apt install unity-tweak-tool

  7. How to Remove GNOME Desktop from Ubuntu 18.04?

    If you don’t want to keep GNOME on the list of available desktop environments, uninstall it with the following command.

    $ sudo apt remove gnome-shell

    If you now restart Ubuntu 18.04 OS, there will be no GNOME desktop in the login screen options.

doug
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Marmayogi
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  • Please indeed add a reason why this would not advisable, or remove the "not recommended" from the title. In addition, your answer only covers returning to Unity (which it should, because that is the question. So remove the "vanilla GNOME" from your title. Finally, you may want to add how to log in to the Unity desktop. Only rebooting won't cut it. – vanadium Mar 11 '19 at 13:12
  • I see your point @vanadium. Strictly no drifting away from question! I am removing the phrase "Vanilla Gnome" from my title. Thanks for pointing this out! – Marmayogi Mar 11 '19 at 15:33
  • @Marmayogi I followed your answer and everything worked fine. I have Unity again! Will I get the updates from the new maintainer or do I have to add a specific repository for that? – Ionică Bizău Mar 12 '19 at 09:31
  • @Ionică Bizău, I must tell you that the Unity packages are not in the main repository anymore. Now, these are served from the Universe repository and packages in the Universe repository are community maintained. Ubuntu developers don’t work directly on these packages any more. In other words, the Unity you are going to use in Ubuntu 18.04 is community maintained. Is it really a bad thing? Not really. You can use them as long as the project is alive and not abandoned completely. – Marmayogi Mar 12 '19 at 14:53