Unity 7.0 Desktop Coming To Ubuntu 13.04

The Unity 7 desktop has been granted a feature freeze exception so that the updated desktop with "a lot of new code" can be landed in Ubuntu 13.04.

Michael Hall of Canonical in a new blog post covers some of the Unity 7 work that will soon be found in Ubuntu 13.04. A PPA is being used for testing the Unity 7 packages for about two weeks before being pushed into the Ubuntu "Raring" repository, but it will happen in time for the April release of Ubuntu 13.04.

Some of the Ubuntu Unity 7 features include:

- Smart scopes as a "intelligent server-side service" for helping to decide if a search query should be pushed through a scope. Smart scopes are supposed to be self-learning and provide more relevant results for users.

- Developers have aimed for "100 Scopes" to be on client machines. They haven't hit quite that number yet but they say that more scopes will be installed than in previous releases.

- For privacy there will be more fine-grained privacy controls for Unity. However, Hall writes, "the default will still be to enable the services that we believe provides the best user experience on Ubuntu."

Hall's blog post that covers some of the Unity 7 features can be read here.