Rudra Saraswat, the maintainer of the official Ubuntu Unity flavor has released today a new tool that lets you install the latest version of the Unity7 desktop environment on your Arch Linux computer.
If you’ve been waiting to install and enjoy the Unity7 desktop environment on your Arch Linux machine, the wait is finally over thanks to unity-installer-arch, a new command-line tool developed by Rudra Saraswat that lets you install the latest and greatest version of the Unity7 desktop on Arch Linux.
The unity-installer-arch tool has been uploaded this morning to AUR (Arch User Repository), which needs to be enabled on your Arch Linux machine before attempting to download and install the Unity7 desktop. I highly recommend using one of the popular AUR helpers like Yay, Paru, Pacaur, or Pamac.
“A lot of people wanted to use Unity on Arch and we were asked about it on various channels/groups of Ubuntu Unity, so I thought of working on it, especially now that I’m actively developing Unity7,” told Rudra Saraswat to 9to5Linux.com.
Here’s how to install the Unity desktop on Arch Linux
To install the latest version of the Unity7 desktop environment on your Arch Linux computer, you will first have to install the unity-installer-arch package from AUR using your favorite AUR helper. I used yay, so I ran the command below in a terminal emulator. However, I suggest using paru as it’s also needed later.
yay install unity-installer-archWhen asked which packages to install, type the 1 option and hit Enter. Then, when prompted that there are two providers for cargo, choose the first option (rust) from repository Extra. After that, you will be asked if you want to remove make dependencies after installation and when asked if you want to see the diffs, just choose N (no).
You will now see a lot of things downloading and compiling so wait until everything is successfully compiled and installed. When the installation of the unity-installer-arch package is complete, simply run the utility (unity-installer-arch) in the terminal emulator to install the Unity7 desktop environment.
Select the first option (Install Unity desktop) and wait for the entire process to finish, which could take as long as an hour if your computer is slow. It took more than an hour to finish on a virtual machine with 2GB RAM.
During the installation, you will be asked for your user password several times and you will be prompted to choose Y (yes) to remove conflicted packages or install additional packages. Basically, you will have to choose Y (yes) to all these prompts for a successful installation of the Unity desktop.
Once the installation is over, log out of your current session and choose the Unity session from the login manager (only works with LightDM). That’s it, enjoy your brand-new Unity7 desktop environment on Arch Linux!
Image credits: Rudra Saraswat
Last updated 14 hours ago