Unity 2D To Go Away In Ubuntu 12.10

[Awesomeness]

Good, it's time to move forward and embrace the future. When is Unity going to be working 100% with Wayland?

You are contradicting yourself.
Is it good or is it time to embrace the future and Wayland?

Despite the “2D” name, Qt-based software is obviously capable of everything fancy. In fact, as you could read in http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA5ODc Qt is better suited for Wayland.

[Veazer]

I'm sad to see them dump Unity-2D so quickly. I found Unity-2D using Compiz instead of Metacity was a slick and speedy Desktop Environment that ran circles around Unity-3D, at least in my experience on integrated graphics. i'm amazed Canonical is willing to accept a significant drop in system performance for what amounts to a menu integrated with a launcher. Without the ability to use Unity-2D, i'll be forced to use another distro and I would bet I'm not the only one who'll be jumping ship.

[devius]

How about multimonitor setups?
I have encountered a 2048x2048 pixel limit on my i945 powered laptop for 3d acceleration, which forced me to use unity 2d when having a second monitor attached.

I think it's Canonical pulling a "Microsoft" and "encouraging" you to buy a new laptop. I also have a laptop with one of those 945G and I can understand that it's not possible to maintain hardware support forever. The 945G is pretty crappy even by 2004 standards.

[droidhacker]

I'm tired of this push-to-3d nonsense. It doesn't improve the user experience, it just adds worthless eye candy.

The fake-3d-on-cpu drivers are WORTHLESS, not because they can't come up with the same numbers in the end, but because they eat CPU for breakfast! Yeah, a multi-core destop rig can run this on CPU without much effect, but guess what? Any multi-core desktop rig HAS WORKING 3D OPENGL DRIVERS!!!! Try running gnome-shell on any atom Zxxx, i.e., THE ONLY ONES WITHOUT 3D DRIVERS!!!! Instead of a happy experience with low intensity 2d, it eats up 80% of your CPU just to draw the screen bloat!!!!

And of course, when you do run it on something with working 3D drivers, its just bloated crawl and crash prone trash!

[siride]

Michael,

We know you're capable of words with greater depth and less ambiguity than "good" and "bad". You might want to invest a larger portion of your time writing your articles. Here's an example of a 5 minute investment in that line:



Not only did I avoid the words "good" and "bad", I correctly avoided the missing "is" in the second half of your sentence. I still fail, because I didn't take the time to remove the first instance of "to be/is". After reading my version, the reader is reminded of what LLVMPIPE is, that only 3D game performance is insufficient, and that the composited desktops need to be OpenGL accelerated for LLVMPIPE to come into play. Yes, writing is hard. It gets easier as you do more of it, it comes out better when you spend a couple minutes figuring out what you're trying to say.

Asking from my own experience, have you considered an editor?

F

I agree with everything you say except the statement about the missing "is". It's either a case of ellipsis, or a situation where we should analyze the conjunction "but" as governing the two verb complements instead of two entire clauses.

[russofris]

Sure, are you interested in financing or contributing then?

Financing, no. We're in uber-frugal mode for the next two years trying to build up as big a buffer as we can prior to attempting our second child.

Contributing, possibly. I'm really not a good editorial author or editor. I've authored a few white papers and help files that I'm proud of, but they're probably not all that exceptional.

How would you envision the contribution workflow operating? You would write an article, place it in a wiki-esque staging area for a predetermined duration where editors could suggest edits, then publish it to the public area when you're content with it? Lock down the duration so that "breaking" news cannot be bureaucratically delayed for too long?

I've never worked in media, so bear with me and we'll see if there's something of value that I (or others) can add.

F

[russofris]

I agree with everything you say except the statement about the missing "is". It's either a case of ellipsis, or a situation where we should analyze the conjunction "but" as governing the two verb complements instead of two entire clauses.

Your analysis is possibly/probably correct, but misses the point I was trying to make. The point was that many of the lines in some of the recent articles are cave-man speak (fire bad, woman pretty, Atook pooka).

Tech writing 101. After you write the first draft, go through your writing and remove all forms of "to be".

The Lazy Fox is Jumping
The Lazy Fox Jumps

The processor does not perform well.
The processor underperforms.

While this may not produce perfect results every time, it gets you thinking about the verbiage, and often leads to better technical writing.

For grammar and formatting, I typically borrow from UCSC or some other institution, depending on the audience.

Again, I'm not claiming to be a superior writer than anyone here, I just think the articles could use some polish. To use a metaphor: I might not know how to spell diarea, but I know when I've got it.

F

[russofris]

I'm tired of this push-to-3d nonsense. It doesn't improve the user experience, it just adds worthless eye candy.

This is not a problem with the tech itself, it is a problem with the Unity/Gnome/KDE implementation of the tech. OSX is a good example of a good (yet subdued) implementation of 3D compositing.

The fake-3d-on-cpu drivers are WORTHLESS.

I disagree that they are worthless. A quality reference software stack is a good thing, even if only used as a baseline in which hardware stacks are compared. To say that a product is not performant, while still in it's infancy, is probably short sighted. CPUs will get faster, the software will get faster, and may become useful given time to grow.

Any multi-core desktop rig HAS WORKING 3D OPENGL DRIVERS!!!!

I completely agree. With the exception of some of the corner cases that you outlined, this is dead-on. I think of LLVMPIPE as a potential VESA alternative, and not a replacement for 3D drivers. It may have additional uses once linux has a multi-GPU framework in place, and performance is improved.

F

[Gusar]

I'm tired of this push-to-3d nonsense. It doesn't improve the user experience, it just adds worthless eye candy.

The fake-3d-on-cpu drivers are WORTHLESS, not because they can't come up with the same numbers in the end, but because they eat CPU for breakfast! Yeah, a multi-core destop rig can run this on CPU without much effect, but guess what? Any multi-core desktop rig HAS WORKING 3D OPENGL DRIVERS!!!! Try running gnome-shell on any atom Zxxx, i.e., THE ONLY ONES WITHOUT 3D DRIVERS!!!! Instead of a happy experience with low intensity 2d, it eats up 80% of your CPU just to draw the screen bloat!!!!

This, pretty much. The machines without working 3d graphics are machines with old and/or slow processors! llvmpipe is useless on those. The fast multi-core machines where llvmpipe is somewhat usable either have integrated graphics with working 3d drivers (so you won't be using llvmpipe anyway), or are desktops where you can easily add a cheap graphic card (so again you will not be using llvmpipe).

To give you a practical example: My oldest laptop has a P4 2GHz processor (without hyperthreading, not that it would matter) and SiS650 graphics. There was never any 3D support in Linux for this SiS graphics, even EXA crashes lately (not that much of EXA is supported, only solid and copy hooks), so I'm using shadowfb. If anyone expects llvmpipe'd Unity to run on this thing, I can only laugh. Laugh hard. Really, seeing llvmpipe as a solution is nonsense. But with a classic non-composited environment (openbox in my case), the machine can still be used very well for common tasks of web browsing, music, videos (the sis driver supports the card's hardware overlay with Xv), writing documents.

[whitecat]

I though the main purpose of 3D-accelerated desktop was to alleviate the CPU, for quite old computers. Example : an Athlon XP / Pentium 4 with a R300 GPU.

I guess I was wrong. It's in fact only to have bling-bling effects.