Nelson Marques announced that he's working very hard on packaging the famous Unity interface from Canonical/Ubuntu to the openSUSE 11.4 operating system.

Unity is the new user interface (shell) designed and created by Canonical for the recently released Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system. It's not a secret that many Ubuntu users hate Unity, but it looks like the OpenSuSE users want it in their distribution.

At the moment, only Unity 2D will be included in the openSUSE 11.4 GNOME:Ayatana software repository, and work on porting Unity 3D will continue. An 1-Click installer will also be available for those who want to test Unity under openSUSE.

Nelson Marques's Unity packages will include some nice features, such as launcher auto-hide, workspace selector, applications menu and files, and transparency enabled by default.

"There are transparencies because I enabled ‘composite’ on metacity, which works very nicely. As far as I could understand, the developers of Unity 2D are also looking into implementing Compiz with Unity 2D, which would be sweet." - said Nelson Marque.

Before uploading the Unity 2D packages, Nelson Marques will have to make sure that various Unity dependencies are properly implemented, and that Compiz is working very well.

The following screenshots show Unity 2D working under the openSUSE 11.4 operating system, courtesy of Nelson Marques. Enjoy!

"Unity 2D will be the first application to use the indicators I have prepared in the past which all all found working, except 1, the AppMenu (strangely it works on GNOME2 panel without issues)." - said Nelson Marques in the announcement.

openSUSE's GNOME:Ayatana software repository also includes popular applications like Evolution, Banshee, Empathy, Metacity, and various Ubuntu indicators.

As an Ubuntu user, I do hope that Unity will be welcomed into the openSUSE community!