Canonical has made it possible to install and test the latest Unity 8 desktop environment on any Ubuntu system just by adding a PPA and installing the appropriate packages.

Currently, the only two ways of testing the latest Ubuntu Next version with Mir and Unity 8 were to download the ISO and do a Live boot or to run in a VMWare. Or so we thought. None of the solutions mentioned is too appealing, but there is a third way, much more elegant, and it works on any supported Ubuntu OS, starting with the 12.04 LTS branch.

As it turns out, this simple installation procedure has been available for quite some time, but it wasn't properly announced, and very few people knew about it, mostly developers did. Fortunately, there is a very helpful wiki in place if you want more details about it, but we can summarize the procedure right here. It should work like a charm, no matter what Ubuntu system you are running (as long it's still supported).

How to install the Ubuntu Next LXC image

LXC is a container normally used in virtualization environments, and it's not usually employed for such tasks, but it still is a great solution. What you are basically doing is start an LXC container that has the entire Ubuntu Next OS and that can be accessed as a regular session from your LightDM greeter, just like you would access a guest account or a GNOME session.

You will need to add a PPA to the system and run a few commands:

code sudo apt-add-repository ppa:unity8-desktop-session-team/unity8-preview-lxc

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install unity8-lxc

sudo unity8-lxc-setup

Please check the official wiki for more details about this process.