Canonical's Working On A Unity 2D Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical's Working On A Unity 2D Desktop

Back in October there was the very controversial news that Canonical would be replacing the GNOME Shell with their own Unity project as the default desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and going forward. The original version and specification for Ubuntu Unity (and as found in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook) required 3D acceleration and would use Compiz as its compositing window manager. For those without the necessary graphics drivers to support the functionality, Canonical's plan for Ubuntu was to have it fall-back to the traditional GNOME desktop and inform the user of their sad graphics support. However, now Canonical's developing a 2D version of Unity for such scenarios...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTAxMg

[Awesomeness]

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

[d2kx]

I am also wondering if the Compiz rewrite was the right decision. Gnome Shell uses Mutter/Clutter etc. and I tried a recent build and performance was great, so the issues they had last year seem to be fixed anyway.

Qt/QML rocks anyway. Unity is a kinda mess right now and they really need to work on it hard over the next 3-4 month or they will be in trouble, because Ubuntu 11.04 sticks to GNOME 2 and doesn't offer a lot of other changes.

[cl333r]

Wait, but the gtk+ libs in 11.04 will be version 3.0?

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively - they wouldn't have to bother creating a 2D backend now, besides, nowadays relatively powerful graphics cards are present even on ARM hardware so the 2D backend will die in a few years anyway (when proper drivers are present) while the qualitative open-source graphics drivers will last for a long time and will benefit a lot more projects than just Unity and will be a serious argument that Canonincal doesn't do only what benefits it directly from (not to open this debate/flame, but you know there are certain companies claiming so).

[BlackStar]

Wait, but the gtk+ libs in 11.04 will be version 3.0?

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively - they wouldn't have to bother creating a 2D backend now, besides, nowadays relatively powerful graphics cards are present even on ARM hardware so the 2D backend will die in a few years anyway (when proper drivers are present) while the qualitative open-source graphics drivers will last for a long time and will benefit a lot more projects than just Unity and will be a serious argument that Canonincal doesn't do only what benefits it directly from (not to open this debate/flame, but you know there are certain companies claiming so).

That would still leave Poulsbo/Via/S3/etc users SOL. A 2d backend makes more sense here.

[blackiwid]

Wait, but the gtk+ libs in 11.04 will be version 3.0?

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively.

hmm I don´t know about the nvidia drivers but the free ati and Intel drivers work well at least for compiz or mutter they work well. If the nouvou driver sucks? (I don´t know that but I would not be suprised) thats Nvidias fault nobody else. They did not give free sourcecode (3d) and not at least specs to build drivers. Because they don´t would loose anything (secrets) by releasing such specs (not specs how to clone the hardware, just to write drivers), they activily fight against the opensource/fs movement. I cant deny the writers of the drivers to make the driver blind, running against a wall bleeding till it falls if the head not breaks before. But I would not even see the needing of such drivers. If a company dont want to give free linux support, they should not get it for free. If they at some point become the worst choice for Linux they would sell less hardware and they have to pay the price for this unsocial behavier. Linux is today a stronger/more important brand/technologie then nvidias hardware, so there is no need for developing a free driver against the will of nvidia.

Same point by arm. Now they are kind of lucky because windows 8 will support their plattform. But in next 1-2 years till this point they have no usable softwareconfiguration because of their secret-bulli-shit. I wanted such device because of its cheapness + 1080p + low consum + passiv... but without usable Linux I would never buy such stuff even if I have to through 50% akku-time away.
Ok Android is ok for touchdevices. but for subnotebooks or netbooks or like they call it smartbooks android sucks like hell.

I think thats not fair to companys like Intel and AMD which give their specs and or drivers free who pay such developers to support the bad companys so the users dont boykott their stuff because there are free drivers. So what do you learn when you give free your specs + drivers, you get nothing from it, but you have costs (loyers..., double driver development...)

To Canonical and Unity. I don´t get the point to fork gnome 3.0 here at all. Gnome 3.0 is good, I could understand if they would make a own interessting theme and maybe one or 2 new tools, or if they tell what could be done better in gnome 3.0 If Ubuntu will as only distro this "fork" or this other gui, then it will not get the developers behind it what it needs. Ubuntu is a strong distribution in having a big community they developed as example the boot-script-thing like initd forgot the name ^^, ok we will see it more choice is not bad, so even if it suck we can swap to gnome 3.0 ^^

[BlackStar]

For the record, Mark appears to be a big proponent of Qt.

To Canonical and Unity. I don´t get the point to fork gnome 3.0 here at all. Gnome 3.0 is good, I could understand if they would make a own interessting theme and maybe one or 2 new tools, or if they tell what could be done better in gnome 3.0 If Ubuntu will as only distro this "fork" or this other gui, then it will not get the developers behind it what it needs. Ubuntu is a strong distribution in having a big community they developed as example the boot-script-thing like initd forgot the name ^^, ok we will see it more choice is not bad, so even if it suck we can swap to gnome 3.0 ^^

Canonical has said that they don't like the direction Gnome 3 is taking (Gnome Shell). They haven't forked anything, Gnome 3 is intact - they just layer a different shell on top of it.

Fork means taking the code, changing it and not contributing the changes back. This is not what's happening here. I don't know how you should call this (a divorce maybe?) but it's not technically a fork.

[Misel]

I tried getting along with Unity but it didn't work out. Two friends of mine and I have yet to find out how to even configure that thing. The most ridiculous thing is the panel on the left part of the screen. I couldn't figure out how to move it to another place or better yet make it autohide.

[leif81]

Very interesting. Looks more and more like Fedora will be the true Gnome/GTK desktop of linux. As a fan of both Fedora and Gnome this is fine by me!

[madjr]

I tried getting along with Unity but it didn't work out. Two friends of mine and I have yet to find out how to even configure that thing. The most ridiculous thing is the panel on the left part of the screen. I couldn't figure out how to move it to another place or better yet make it autohide.

the autohide (well something better: intelli-hide) is already working in 11.04 alpha. Works very nicely, but of course not for daily use yet