I know you can run unity8 on your desktop, which will pop up a qml phone shell, but can you run it as your desktop? If so how do you achieve this, are there things not yet working on it?
My confusion here is whether unity8 has a desktop mode/tablet mode/tv mode along side the phone mode, or are these slated for a future release.
You need to install the unity8-desktop-session-mir package, and then should be able to log in to the Unity 8 session.
The answer is here:
https://launchpad.net/unity8-desktop-session
Subscribe to the bug mail if you want to keep up to date. Installing this will require some aptitude on developing for Ubuntu.
I contacted the head of the team some time ago, and he was just getting things together. Considering though their focus is on the phone; hardly any push from the development team at Canonical has happened thus far. As far as I understand from speaking to community developers on IRC; the Tablet implementation will be the next official focus for development, and they will be holding a design conference for that sometime in the near future (It could have already happened; I just have not heard about it. If someone could confirm, please comment.) To which then after will a Desktop design session be held some time around 15.04 I believe.
edit:
Just download 15.04 from daily images; it should have the most recent version of the desktop.
It doesn't have a desktop interface yet; only phone and tablet. The first version of the desktop interface is expected to arrive some time during the next release ending in October.
