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Will Ubuntu TV run on all available desktop environments? Which environments will Ubuntu TV run at?

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I do not think that Ubuntu TV is meant for desktop computers. It is a kind of embedded OS for internet capable televsion sets. See, the web site: ubuntu.com/tv –  grahammechanical Jan 9 '12 at 23:41

5 Answers 5

up vote 12 down vote accepted


Simply based on the interface and goal of the Ubuntu TV.

Ubuntu is the only open-source OS designed to provide consistent user experiences across multiple diverse different form factors, from the PC to the smartphone and the television.


The Ubuntu TV interface is a Desktop Environment designed to emulate (and built on top of a fork of) the Unity-2D. Since the Unity interface is Canonical's consistent user experience in the computing world the thought of re-designing Ubuntu TV to mimic other Desktop Environments will likely not be on the short list of goals for Ubuntu TV.

Only time will tell, but other DE maintainers such as KDE, XFCE, etc may develop and modify the Ubuntu TV to mimic their style Destkop Environment.

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Ubuntu TV is a desktop environment, so no. It's like asking if you can run Gnome-Shell on KDE.

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For now, as January 10th, Ubuntu-tv only runs under unity-2d.

You can install it from source following this instructions.

Or you can just use a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/test3
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unity-2d
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-video

Note that this software is in a very early development phase, so it will be quite unstable. Don't install it in production machines, it will likely break unity-2D.

For more information refer to the above wiki or this articule on OMG! Ubuntu.

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Technically it is possible to run the interface on top of any Desktop environment, since it is based on Unity 2D, but at this point it seems it does not yet work in other Desktop environments.

However, it should be a matter of simply "porting" the code to other platforms, as it is based on Qt Quick (AFAIK), and thus rather portable.

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unity 2d can run on top of all sorts of things. like gnome kde metacity xfce lxde liceWM fluxbox the list goes on and on.

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