Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr: Unity and Compiz were updated today, bringing new GTK3 CSS themed Unity window decorations along with other interesting changes.
The latest Unity available in the Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr repositories comes with the new GTK3 CSS themed window decorations which we've covered a while back, replacing the Compiz Decor plugin.
The new decoration support full GTK 3 theming and they introduce improved resizing speed and anti-aliased corners (see above) as well as a fix for an old regression: the panel is now right-clickable when a window is maximized with global menu enabled, displaying the same menu that's available when right clicking an unmaximized window titlebar (lets you minimize, unmaximize, set the window always on top, move to workspace, etc.):
Ambiance and Radiance themes received support for these new decorations a while back, that's why they look the same as with the old Compiz decorations.
Unfortunately, the new Unity decorations don't support changing the window buttons position, at least for now and also, most themes need to be updated to work with these new decorations.
Unfortunately, the new Unity decorations don't support changing the window buttons position, at least for now and also, most themes need to be updated to work with these new decorations.
Another important change is that Unity Control Center is now used by default for Unity instead of GNOME Control Center. You won't notice any changes because Unity Control Center is a fork of GNOME Control Center. The reason for forking it is to allow Ubuntu GNOME to use the latest GNOME Control Center, because Unity used a heavily patched version that couldn't be updated to the latest GNOME release.
The latest Unity also brings a nice improvement for narrow screens: if there's not enough horizontal space to display the appmenu, a dropdown menu is now used at the end of the menu:
screenshot via +Marco Trevisan
Other improvements include:
- Initial work for HiDPI support (for that, Cairo was also updated). Unfortunately I was unable to test this change because I don't have a HiDPI screen;
- Compiz/Unity keybindings now show up in System Settings;
- implemented the GNOME key grabber interface so that Compiz and gnome-settings-daemon no longer have to fight for key grabs;
- many other changes.
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| Compiz / Unity keybindings in System Settings |
Sadly, with this update, it's no longer possible to scroll on launcher icons to switch between applications (design decision; via +David Calle). You can still scroll to switch between multiple windows of the same application though.
Complete changelog: Unity | Compiz
If you're using Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, you should receive an update with these changes in the next few minutes / hours.
