Unity 7 Still Being Tuned Ahead Of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 13 March 2014 at 03:57 PM EDT. 16 Comments
UBUNTU
New features like HiDPI and local menus are still being tuned within the Unity 7 desktop environment ahead of next month's debut of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

This morning on the final day of the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit for March 2014 was a session about the Unity 7 desktop's default settings. One of the main items that were discussed during the session this morning were on locally integrated menus as a new feature to Ubuntu 14.04 rather than just having global menus, which has already been implemented, but the defaults are to be decided. Additionally, the HiDPI settings for Unity 7 with Ubuntu 14.04 are still being figured out.

In particular, Ubuntu developers are looking at having local menus by default, support for the HiDPI scaling factor on per-display basis that is saved across sessions, and other display-related changes for supporting the latest HiDPI ultrabooks and laptops on the market.

While earlier this week I wrote about switching my ultrabook and no longer relying on OS X while originally switching to Xfce, I have since switched to Unity 7 on Ubuntu 14.04... There will be another article with greater explanations, but so far from my HiDPI testing of Unity 7 on Ubuntu 14.04 it's a big improvement (at least over Xfce on Ubuntu 14.04) but there's still some big headaches and eye strain without additional tweaking. Fortunately, some of what was discussed during this vUDS session today should help out.

More details on the Unity 7 default/settings tweaks can be found via the summit notes and the session recording that's embedded below.

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