Ubuntu Unity faces possible shutdown as team member cries for help

Ubuntu Unity, the community-led project that revived the Unity7 desktop, is experiencing a bit of a crisis, leading its team to ask the public for help after admitting that the flavor is "broken and needs to be fixed."

In a message posted on Ubuntu's discourse page, Maik Adamietz, the Community moderator and administrator who has been with the project since 2020, explained that the project lead, Rudra B. Rudra, has had less time to dedicate to the work recently. As a result, the team could not ship a stable 25.10 release this October.

Because Rudra is busy with university exams, development slowed down significantly around the 25.04 release earlier this year. Maik claimed that he also had to step away for personal reasons around that same time. This lack of active maintenance meant that while the system continued to automatically generate daily ISO images, nobody was actually testing them by hand.

This led to a pile-up of critical bugs that now prevent users from upgrading from 25.04 or even installing the DE on top of other Ubuntu flavors without serious issues.

Maik said he has been speaking with Tobiyo Kuujikai (@fuseteam), another mod for the project, and they both decided to do the best they can to "keep things going" in the interim. The problem is that neither of them has the necessary technical skills to maintain a full operating system distribution or fix the deep code issues currently plaguing the desktop.

Maik wants other developers and project leads in the Linux community to step in and help bring Unity back to the workable state it was in during the 24.04 LTS era. The immediate goal is to find capable people who can squash these bugs and maintain the project at least until the next LTS release, Ubuntu 26.04, arrives next year. He even suggested that someone could teach the current team how to handle the more complex maintenance tasks so they can eventually take it over themselves.

Ubuntu Unity started out as a passion project after Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, made the controversial move to end its development of Unity back in 2017. At that time, Canonical switched back to the GNOME desktop for its main product, leaving Unity's dedicated user base without an official path forward. The community effort, largely driven by a then-younger Rudra, brought the desktop back and eventually earned official flavor status from Canonical in 2022.