Is there an active Unity 7 fork?

Canonical announced yesterday that it will drop Unity 7 from Ubuntu 18.04 onwards, reverting back to the Gnome desktop environment. I know all the larger desktop environments quite well, Gnome, KDE and Xfce; however, Unity is the one I am more comfortable with and on which I I feel more productive.

I would therefore like to know if there any desktop environments forked from Unity 7 that could be installed on Ubuntu. I understand we are still one year away from the shift, but it is never too early to test the alternatives and eventually choose a project to contribute to.


  • yunit is a Unity 8 fork (Unity8org was the original name).
  • Ubports. A Q&a about this has some insights in this. They use Ubuntu touch as their base so decided to not join yunity.

Still nothing on Unity 7.


Artemis Desktop

Formerly known as "Enjade" (read more here)

The Artemis Project aims to bring the best environments to continue the venerable Unity 7 desktop in the modern Linux space. With an open, friendly community and a willingness to make the Linux desktop more friendly, the Unity legacy will live on while bringing new innovations to the table.

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The pseudo-fork build on top of Plasma is Artemis Core. This is the project I started back in April when Unity 7 and Unity 8 was announced 'abandoned'. Everyone is more aware of Core as it has a better chance of surviving in modern technologies, like Wayland.

You may want to consider taking a look at Artemis Pure, the project's actual Unity 7 fork. Pure gets the same feature updates as Core, though it come a little later as Core is the primary focus. This is probably what you're looking for, though there is no set release yet as we are in the process of renaming files from unity to artemis-pure (or simple pure, for that matter). You can check this out on our GitHub repositories.

Information for both of these platforms can be found on the About page.


We have two active ports working on separate parts.

For desktop(Yunity) : https://github.com/yunit-io/yunit Most discussion is on how to port it to Wayland, but don't believe it is finalized. Also has a reddit board. : https://www.reddit.com/r/Yunit/ They have a logo challenge at present.

For mobile : https://ubports.com/ For more information check out their forum here : https://forums.ubports.com/topic/170/a-vision-of-where-to-go-after-ubuntu-touch-s-death UBPorts also has a discussion area for Yunity on their forum now - https://forums.ubports.com/category/36/yunit

Details are still being worked out.

Unity 7 has no port as already stated. This is just to give correct information for Unity 8.