I’ve received requests from people asking how to try the windowed mode on their unity8 enabled devices (yes phones too). Here’s how it works:
You need a phone or tablet, flashed with the devel-proposed channel. On a PC, running an up-to-date vivid and having unity8-desktop-session-mir installed should get you going. Get a terminal on the device somehow (ssh/adb/terminal app) and execute:
gsettings set com.canonical.Unity8 usage-mode Windowed
While this currently works on phones too, there’s the issue that the window’s title bar is hiding behind the panel so you can’t really drag the windows around. Start the gallery-app to get around that. On larger screens, the panel should allow you dragging windows from there too. Here’s some screenshots:
Windowed mode on Nexus 4
Windowed mode on Nexus 7
Windowed mode on a PC
To get back to staged mode, do:
gsettings set com.canonical.Unity8 usage-mode Staged
Again, this is still an early work in progress, loads of stuff missing in windowed mode. The gsettings flag is considered temporary and experimental, it might disappear at any time. Also, we might disable windowed mode on form factors where it doesn’t really make sense, like on the Nexus 4 screenshot above.