Canonical improves Unity 7’s ‘low graphics mode’

A Canonical developer has improved Unity 7’s so-called ‘low graphics’ mode. As a result, a standard installation of Ubuntu should work more smoothly in, among other things, virtual machines where hardware acceleration cannot be used.

So far, a normal Ubuntu installation using the Unity desktop environment will not run smoothly in low graphics mode if 3d acceleration cannot be used. This is mainly due to the use of certain visual effects.

To make the low graphics environment more workable, developer Eleni Stea has addressed the Unity 7 environment. To this end, it has reduced the amount of animations for parts such as the launcher, menus and screen changer. In addition, blur, fade in and out have been removed and drop shadows have been reduced.

The custom graphics mode basically detects itself whether certain GL features are present on a system. But there is also another way to activate the mode, which is by adding a startup script called lowgfx.conf to upstart in .config:

start on starting unity7
pre-start script
initctl set-env -g UNITY_LOW_GFX_MODE=1
end script

At this point, the hack won’t work for users of the upcoming release of Ubuntu ‘Yakety Yak’ as it moves to systemd for user sessions. More information will be available soon on how to force the feature in version 16.10.