If Canonical hadn’t burned via money and goodwill all the way through its smartphone detour within the mid-2010s, Ubuntu would most probably nonetheless send with the Harmony desktop these days – albeit in an advanced shape.
What would that shape in reality seem like?
Neatly, you don’t have to close your eyes and believe, because of Ubuntu neighborhood member Muqtxdir, who’s experiment in “re-building ubuntu’s solidarity shell in a wayfire consultation via gtk4-layer-shell and libadwaita widgetry” (sic) provides us a sideways glimpse.
Muqtxdir, who lend a hand take care of and increase Ubuntu’s Yaru theme and contributes to the immutable Vanilla OS Linux distribution, just lately shared a video of his alt-future tinkering and the consequences are value a glance:
The demo displays a operating launcher, dock (with BFB on the time) and panel, all in an instant recognisable as Harmony (in spirit, if no longer equivalent intimately), however with a flatter glance and abundant use of background blur.
Beauty flattery gets you… any individual?
Harmony-esque UIs1 are to be had in more than a few Linux desktops, formally or unofficially. Maximum are extra like tribute acts than devoted recreations. Harmony used to be greater than the sum of its portions – it wasn’t only a vertical launcher and a large app grid launcher.
It used to be designed via a staff of paid design skilled, iterated on over a few years with comments from common rounds of user-testing. It used to be its personal distinct factor; an end-to-end desktop with a constant and predictable behaviour.
Which is why Harmony didn’t trade its basics (workspaces, panels, launchers, applets and many others) after its desktop debit 2011, save for the ones under-appreciated Good Scopes and the choice of in the community built-in menus, the latter no longer arriving till 2014.
Muqtxdir’s venture isn’t a proper effort to restore Harmony, so there’s no Discord or better ambition in the back of it than what’s proven.
However it displays that with skill and the appropriate uncooked fabrics, other folks can construct cool issues – and any individual may recreate Harmony for a contemporary technology.
Symbol credit score best: Muqtxdir
