Ubuntu – How to restart Unity 2D

unityunity-2d

As per How do I restart Unity? But I guess unity --replace would start the 3D variant.

Best Answer

unity-2d has some of its own processes and some processes that derive from unity (unity-2d uses unity libraries).

You can find these processes with:

ps aux | grep unity

This yields these (see the right-most tokens in the above command output):

unity-2d-launcher
unity-2d-panel
/usr/lib/unity-place-applications/unity-applications-daemon
/usr/lib/unity-place-files/unity-files-daemon

Each of these can be individually stopped (and each will automatically restart) with:

sudo killall <process>

So to kill them all, list them all in the above command:

sudo killall unity-2d-launcher unity-2d-panel \
/usr/lib/unity-place-applications/unity-applications-daemon \
/usr/lib/unity-place-files/unity-files-daemon

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to restart Unity

I don't use Unity but given what I know of its mechanics, this should work:

unity

You'll want to stick that in a run box (Alt+F2) rather than a terminal or it'll break when you exit the terminal.

If you want to run it from a terminal use:

setsid unity

Ubuntu – the difference between Unity-2D and Unity-3D

Technical differences.

Unity

Written in C++ as a compiz plugin and uses nux for OpenGL support.
Requires hardware acceleration (Compositing). (Hardware requirements)
Is shipped as the default environment in 11.04
Also does window management via compiz itself.

Unity 2D

Written in C++ with Qt
Works on systems without hardware acceleration, like ARM-based platforms, as a result it is incapable of advanced 3D effects.
Shipped as the fallback method in 11.10. Is not shipped by default in 11.04, available as a separate package that the user has to install.
Needs a seperate window manager (like metacity) to do window management.