Posted on 01/03/2011 6:58:38 PM PST by ThunderSleeps
Canonical's decision to go with the Unity shell on GNOME may be a game changer for Ubuntu, but it doesn't come without risk. Mark Shuttleworth's declared aims are to unite design with free software. He hopes to blur the line between the web and the desktop, to create an intuitive Linux desktop that is a thing of beauty, and to make Ubuntu and free software popular among the kinds of user who have never heard of free software before.
(Excerpt) Read more at h-online.com ...
From what I've seen of unity - it is not a good idea on a full size desktop. May be acceptable on a low powered netbook where CPU horsepower and screen real estate limits you to one thing at a time... But the interface is just a pain in the neck.
OMG!!
This is News/Activism???
Spreek Engrish.
I’ve got an older Dell laptop and I don’t think it’s graphics card will support unity. I’m hoping it’ll default to Gnome on my machine, or I’ll just stick with the current release.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17371/the_linux_desktop_may_soon_be_a_lot_faster
I have mhy own Ubunto-based distro out (http://www.dreadmoon.com), and this move to Unity is going to cause me to base the next release on something entirely different.
installing Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook right now on a old Dell Laptop,,, will see if I can install Xubuntu-desktop package on top if it’s a problem.
You won’t be alone in jumping away. Several distros are making the jump. Proving to be quite a pain really.
I refuse to even consider ubuntu. I don’t like the name. Too politically correct for me.
One of them (PCLinuxOS or MEPIS) will probably end up as my primary OS in the next month or so. I may look at Mint too...
I just hope that Unity doesn’t cost Linux its consistency with the ‘thin client’ option. The use of framebuffers seems to have done a good job of addressing the needs of higher performance graphics apps.
Vastly understated. Back in 1985, I loved writing in raw X and drawing my own buttons and menus and tracking mouse and mouse down. And there was a neat protocol for the X server to send me the mouse up and mouse down and key clicks after they were processed by the appropriate drivers. That paradigm hasn't made sense for years and is one of the big reasons that Microsoft has dominated the desktop.
The framebuffer will speed rendering but won’t solve the overhead of passing X events from server to client and back, so real time interactive graphics is still basically impossible.
What's funny is that now that thin clients are popular again, Microsoft is finding out that it's quite a kludge to make it work using Microsoft's paradigm. X was built for that kind of thing.
That’s a valid point. Even more clunky is remote desktop through a VPN. But that is typical for MS, make an easy kludge that is fast and simple, and postpone the hard stuff until bandwidth catches up or third parties do the work for them.
I've read that this is already under way with Unity. However, I'll be surprised if it is in production within the next couple of years.
BTW, for anyone interested, I used the great service provided at 'reconstructor.org' in putting together my own Linux distro. I'll be using them for the next release as well, but baselining on Debian rather than Ubuntu.
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