Unity 2D

Unity 2D's goal is to provide the Unity desktop shell on hardware platforms that cannot currently support Unity's OpenGL requirements (see Hardware Requirements for Unity for more details).

Its architecture is very close to Unity's as it only replaces the user interface elements but still shares all the same backend components. Specifically, Unity 2D replaces the panel, launcher and places components as defined in Unity's architecture overview. Moreover it does not enforce the use of Compiz as a window manager but instead uses a slightly tweaked version of Metacity.