As far as I know, they're the same thing. Unity 8 Desktop Mode will be the normal desktop experience, but reimplemented in a Qt-based shell because that's what

As far as I know, they're the same thing. Unity 8 Desktop Mode will be the normal desktop experience, but reimplemented in a Qt-based shell because that's what Ubuntu uses as its standard API now. ("Reimplemented" as compared to Unity 7, which had the same interface with different underlying technologies.) Therefore, when you plug your phone into a monitor, it will give you a normal desktop experience, just running on your phone. However, I'm not an Ubuntu developer; I just follow their work. So this could be wrong.