Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life

Team begs for help as teenage dev who revived Canonical’s old Unity desktop prioritizes studies

The Ubuntu Unity project is in trouble because its maintainer, a Linux whiz kid, has had less time to work on it due to his studies. Now other team members are appealing to the wider Ubuntu community for help. 

Taking to the Ubuntu forums earlier this week, Unity team member Maik Adamietz admitted that things in Unityland aren't faring that great, and for a perfectly good reason that no one can really fault it for. Project leader Rudra Saraswat, who created the Unity Remix project in 2020 to rescue the replaced-by-GNOME interface from obscurity when he was just 10 years old, suddenly has other things on his plate. 

Now a teenager, Saraswat is busy with his studies and simply can't dedicate the time to keep Unity operating properly. 

"We can't blame him for that," Adamietz noted in his post. At the end of the day, however, "Unity is broken and needs to be fixed," he added. 

According to Adamietz, Saraswat's busy schedule contributed to Unity, an official Ubuntu flavor since 2022, missing its planned release for Ubuntu 25.10 earlier this month due to the discovery of "critical bugs that prevented us from marking the ISO as ready." 

Adamietz noted that the most recent Ubuntu Unity ISOs haven't been tested by humans and have just been automatically generated, meaning that the bugs are piling up as the underlying Ubuntu OS changes. 

"These bugs are also present when you upgrade from 25.04 to 25.10 or try to install the Unity desktop on top of another flavor," Adamietz added. In other words, the project is heading for the lands of well-and-truly-broken abandonware if someone won't step in and help. 

Don't look to Adamietz or other members of the Unity project to keep things going, though: He admits he simply doesn't have the skills needed to keep an entire distro moving.

"I nor [Tobiyo Kuujikai, another member of the Unity team] have any technical/developer skills to do this and we both do not know what it takes to be a maintainer," Adamietz said, referring to discussions he'd had recently with Kuujikai about their predicament. 

"I indeed currently don't have the skills and time needed to fix the current bugs in Unity, so also from me the call for help to keep this project going," Kuujikai added in the Ubuntu forums thread. 

If you're an Ubuntu enthusiast with the ability to keep Unity operational, now is your time to shine, as the team is seeking help from anyone willing to step in and lend a hand. Per Adamietz, the Unity team is looking for someone who can fix bugs, get the project "back to a workable state as it was with 24.04 and the releases before that," and help the team not miss their planned Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release currently scheduled for April. 

"Maybe someone could teach us how things are done so that we can take it over in time," Adamietz added. 

We reached out to Saraswat to see what his plans are for the future of Unity, but didn't immediately hear back. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces. ®