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Did I understand correct that the Gnome shell is the a shell written to allow GUI based operation, and that the Unity GUI is actually one of the interfaces that are based on the Gnome shell?

Arcticooling
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2 Answers2

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GNOME Shell and Unity are both shells on top of the GNOME desktop environment. Neither is based on the other; you either use GNOME Shell, or Unity, and underneath that you’ll have GNOME.

Stephen Kitt
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  • Aren't they both built on GTK? AFAIK, GNOME is an SDK that can be used to build apps, but any GTK apps will work fine on Unity and probably GNOME. – SilverWolf Nov 13 '17 at 19:53
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Until version 17.04 Ubuntu was delivered with the Unity 7 desktop environment as default, as of versions 17.10 and ongoing it is delivered with the Gnome 3 desktop environment as default of which gnome-shell is a part of.

But there are a lot more Flavors of Ubuntu, namely Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and those have all different desktop environments. Unity7 is as of now still available in the repositories for 17.10 but might be dropped in further versions of Ubuntu due to the fact that Canonical stopped developing it.

Short overview of the flavors:

  • Ubuntu: before 17.10 with Unity 7 desktop environment, since 17.10 with gnome environment
  • Lubuntu: has the LxDe desktop environment
  • Kubuntu: has the KDE Plasma desktop environment
  • Xubuntu: has the Xfce desktop environment
  • GnomeUbuntu: has the Gnome 3 desktop environment and is discontinued as flavor since version 17.10 where it became the default.

So Unity is based on Gnome and gnome was up until 11.04 the default desktop environment for Ubuntu. Unity was designed to use existing functions and underlaying programs which changed over time, in newest versions of Unity you will only find traces of gnome and even most of the underlaying programs have been changed and altered.

So yes Unity is 'based' on gnome, but in fact has very much to do with it in forms of customization and functionality.

Videonauth
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