Trying Out The Experimental Unity 8 Session On Ubuntu 16.10

With this month's Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" release, Unity 7 on the X.Org Server is used by default on the desktop while an alternate Unity 8 + Mir session is installed by default, but while it's available is not used unless logging into this newer desktop stack. Here's my few minutes of trying it out this morning with all of the latest Ubuntu 16.10 packages.

I hadn't tried out the experimental Unity 8 session on an Ubuntu desktop in quite a number of months. When logging into this Unity 8 session today with what's installed by default, it's quite bare. Only the system settings and Ubuntu web browser are prominently available.

But when firing up the Ubuntu Web Browser, not only was it slow, but it wasn't rendering pages correctly. This brief Unity 8 testing was done on an Intel Core i5 Skylake system making use of the HD Graphics on the default Ubuntu 16.10 driver stack.

Various scopes are available, such as Yahoo Finance and Reddit.

I kept trying to find the Ubuntu Terminal for Unity 8, but had no such luck. The ubuntu-terminal-app was installed on the system, but not showing up in the menu. To make matters worse, when switching to a VT to get command-line access, I wasn't able to switch back into the Unity 8 session as it would just appear as a black screen.

The scopes can easily take over the entire screen or windowed with the desktop mode on Unity 8.