Rolling Unity Back to the Stock Ubuntu 16.04 Version

A recent batch of Unity and Compiz updates landed on Ubuntu 16.04, and it broke my fractional scaling.

Someone already filed a bug, but nobody seems to give a shit.

So what do you do? Roll back, obviously. Except rolling back Unity isn’t that simple — too many dependencies, plus core components like Compiz. If you’re going to roll back, you might as well go big.

For the rollback method you can refer to this article: https://plumz.me/archives/1308/

The only difference is that when setting priorities, keep only the basic release sources and roll back everything update-related.

It takes a while, since basically every package gets downgraded. Once that’s done, pin the Unity version immediately.

You can use the hold command:

sudo apt-get hold unity

Then just update again.

After that, 1.5x scaling finally works.