A Ubuntu community contributor going by the name Muqtxdir has shared a working demonstration of Unity’s desktop shell rebuilt using entirely modern Linux technologies.
The project combines the Wayfire Wayland compositor with GTK4, gtk4-layer-shell, and libadwaita to recreate the familiar layout of Ubuntu’s classic desktop. A video of the result was shared publicly this week and has attracted considerable attention across the Linux community.
This is not a revival project. There is no repository to clone, no install instructions, and no announced roadmap.
What Muqtxdir built is better understood as a technical exploration, a demonstration that the bones of Unity can be reconstructed on a modern Wayland stack using current tooling.
The result shows a working left-side launcher dock, a top panel, and the iconic BFB button, all rendered with a flatter visual style and background blur that brings the interface forward in time without losing the proportions and spatial logic that made Unity distinctive in the first place.
Muqtxdir is not an unknown name in the Ubuntu ecosystem. He is a contributor to the Yaru icon and theme project, which provides the default visual identity for Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop.
He also contributes to Vanilla OS, the immutable Linux distribution that ships its own take on a clean, opinionated desktop experience. The Unity recreation sits comfortably alongside that kind of work: someone with deep familiarity with how a desktop fits together, spending personal time on something that interests them. The technical choices are interesting in their own right.
Wayfire is a Wayland compositor built on wlroots. It is extensible by design, with a plugin architecture that allows developers to add compositor-level behaviour in ways that most compositors do not support easily.
That flexibility is what makes it a suitable foundation for rebuilding something like Unity’s shell, where the dock, panel, and launcher all need to interact with the compositor directly rather than sitting on top of it as passive application windows.
GTK4-layer-shell is the piece that lets GTK4 applications behave as proper desktop shell components under Wayland. Standard application windows in Wayland cannot anchor themselves to screen edges, occupy reserved space, or draw above other windows in the way a panel or dock needs to. The layer shell protocol gives them those capabilities, and gtk4-layer-shell exposes that protocol to GTK4 applications.
Combined with libadwaita for widget rendering, the stack gives Muqtxdir modern, well-supported building blocks that happen to be capable of producing something that looks and behaves like a desktop shell.
Unity itself has a complicated history worth remembering in this context.
Canonical introduced Unity as the default Ubuntu desktop in 2011. It replaced the GNOME 2 panel layout that Ubuntu had used since its earliest releases. The decision was controversial at the time.
The left-side launcher, the HUD, the Smart Scopes, the global menu and locally integrated menus were all ideas that Canonical developed and iterated on with a dedicated design team over several years.
Unity did not change its core fundamentals after the desktop debut because the fundamentals worked. It was a coherent, opinionated, well-tested desktop environment that many users preferred over what came before or after it.
Canonical discontinued Unity in 2017 when it abandoned its smartphone and convergence ambitions. GNOME became the default desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 onward. The decision left a community of Unity users without an upgrade path, and it has left an identifiable gap ever since.
Several projects have attempted to fill it in various ways. Ubuntu Unity, a community-maintained spin of Ubuntu that ships a maintained version of Unity 7, continues today. Lomiri, developed by the UBports project for Ubuntu Touch, carries a different DNA and a different goal. Neither is quite the same thing as what Muqtxdir built this week.
What makes the Wayfire recreation interesting is not purely nostalgia. It demonstrates that the layout and interaction model of Unity translates to a modern Wayland environment without compromise.
The blur, the flat rendering, and the GTK4 widget toolkit all suggest what an evolved Unity might look like today had Canonical continued developing it. The video is worth watching for that reason alone, and it can be found at Muqtxdir’s YouTube Channel.
Whether the project grows beyond a personal experiment depends entirely on Muqtxdir. There is no community call to action attached to the work. But the Linux desktop has a long history of solo experiments turning into projects that outlast the circumstances that created them.
