Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged. It's the same for any project, really – if you have a wide base of users of a project across many distributions, it gives everyone involved a reason to work to make sure it's easy to maintain the project across distributions."
Though before you get too excited, Adam is not proposing this as an official Fedora feature at this time nor does he even know if he will be able to get all of Unity's dependencies properly packaged, etc. Unity also depends upon some patches at this point (i.e. for Compiz) that aren't living in the mainline trees yet.
More can be read on
Adam's blog. Unity is the new desktop interface being designed by Canonical originally for netbooks and now for desktops where it will be
the default in Ubuntu 11.04 and later. At this point, Ubuntu is the only major Linux distribution shipping with this desktop experience. To see what it looks like as of Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, see
our screenshots from yesterday.
