Adoption of Unity is the Most Significant Change Ever for Ubuntu, Says Mark Shuttleworth

Gnome Shell. I'll admit that I haven't looked into it yet, but for now I' ll keep an open mind. If I don't like it after release it's probably xfce for me...

@montezuma: Great point. Unless some distros ship with a legacy GNOME build the way some are still supporting KDE 3.x it's either GNOME shell or find a different desktop environment.

I've never been a fan of GNOME and I mostly use Xfce so this doesn't really affect me all that much. Gnome 2.x users may very well have the same reaction KDE users had to KDE 4.0 when it came out. I actually like the current incarnations of KDE 4.x but the early releases were horrendous. There are still lots of folks out there who don't even like KDE 4.5.x and their choice has been to stick with the legacy software or move elsewhere.

I touted LXDE a few months back, but I have finally managed to set up a bare-bones Sawfish environment, with only GKrellM and a pager. Spartan, yes, but it launches fast, and has lots of tricks under the hood that I can tie to keys.

My favorite WM for lightweight to barebones environments is still PekWM. I particularly like how easy and intuitive it is to create single tabbed windows with multiple different applications. That is incredibly useful with limited screen estate, like a small netbook screen. Here is my article on PekWM from a year and a half ago: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/improved-linux-screen-s...

The screenshot where I show PekWM + fbpanel + pcmanfm + VLHot is typical of how I use that WM. That combo (or even tint2 in place of fbpanel) is very light, very fast, and gives me plenty of functionality. Since PekWM is OpenDesktop compliant I can mix and match things in from other DEs and WMs at will.

Quoting:There are still lots of folks out there who don't even like KDE 4.5.x

And I'm one of them. KDE may have begun to gain back functionality, but it's such a cluttered desktop. But there are so many Things I really don't like about.

GNOME, that's current GNOME desktop, gets out of your way, KDE is totally in your face, rather like the Windows desktop.

One of the problems to KDE4.5 is that KDE-pim 4.5 (one of the few KDE4-pieces I use) seems to be in a pretty bad shape. Apart from being slow and Windows-like, I didn't find the 'desktop' that bad, though I admit I changed back to WMaker - in my opinion Gnome is totally in your face, rather like the Windows desktop.

Gnome-Shell isn't a bad idea, it's potentially interchangeable between MIDs and Full Size Desktops (it could work well in both touch and mouse driven modes). The biggest problems I have with it at the moment are that you can't hide the top panel/the window decorations don't integrate into the top panel, and the menu doesn't seem to work as well as the current GNOME menu.

When running it on one of my netbook, I lose all that desktop space that's taken up by the top panel, and I can't find items that are normally on the System menus.

I'd like to see the menu,Favourites, "places" area as a set of vertical tabs that reveal the tab contents by sliding vertically, that would work with both a mouse driven interface and a touch interface.

What I fear though is that they'll be too influenced by Unity and other touch oriented desktops, and we'll end up with something that's too inflexible.

Calm down, people - I'm leaning towards giving the ubuntu developers a wee bit more time before we lynch them. I'm sure unity will improve a lot in the coming months leading up to the 11.04 release. in any case, I'm sticking with ubuntu for now -

If worst comes to worst, I might give debian another whirl, but I'm done with red crap ;)

I do not like this unity look I do not like it on my notebook I do not like this interface gook I do not like it on my netbook I do not like this 'one size fits all' sop I infact hate it on my desktop

I have to question this Shuttleworth man Whose mode of logic is "Because I can"

Quoting:I'm sure unity will improve a lot in the coming months leading up to the 11.04 release

It's going to have to, and a lot. However, given that they seem to think the new netbook interface, using Unity, is the go. While in use restrictive and inflexible, it's like trying to interact with a Mobile phone desktop, and it takes up desktop space on a small screen that could be used by the applications, I don't hold out a lot of hope that the "improvements" will actually improve anything.

In other words, if what we have now is the basic design (otherwise why release it as a working desktop) from which the Unity desktop will move forward, then the end result will be lipstick on a pig, much like KDE 4, where the basic design was the original 4.0 release, and everything since has been the application of lipstick.

@ta - I can't believe they would fumble that badly, i.e. pull a kde4. Hopefully sanity will prevail.

mandatory compositing from a distro that doesnt ship those drivers by default ...

Weird thing is, I read that Unity was chosen because Compiz is faster than Gnome's mutter, and then I read about Unity being slow. For someone not up to date with Gnome - neither Ubuntu (like yours sincerely) - such a thing wouldn't make sense at all.

az: Even though we're now in the dark days of wintertime, rest assured, even over here we can see the sunbeams caused by your rhyme.

Quoting:I'm leaning towards giving the ubuntu developers a wee bit more time before we lynch them.

You take away all our fun. C'mon, we need a good lynching now and again.

[Ducks and runs]

> C'mon, we need a good lynching now and again.

Well, today's an appropriate day for it, if ever there was one.

Quoting:mandatory compositing from a distro that doesnt ship those drivers by default ...

Oh, I'm bettin' that they already have a solution in mind for that conundrum....

Quoting:Weird thing is, I read that Unity was chosen because Compiz is faster than Gnome's mutter, and then I read about Unity being slow.

That is why they are moving to compiz - to make it faster.

@herz I would hope so, ati's open source are passable, nouveau on the other hand, utter drek. To understand how begrudging I am of complimenting ati, I typically refer to them as A(nother) T(errible) I(nvestment).

The proprietary drivers are easy enough to load at runtime, but ubuntu already has a small problem with not being able to pack enough data onto a livecd to do a proper install, to get the drivers on the disc they would have to push yet another thing off that would need to be downloaded as part of the install, or remove a few things from base install.

If they do go with the open drivers, you can bet that there will be an awful lot of nvidia users who are ticked off when the performance drops into the bucket.

@az re: ati/nvidia - For the past 10 years I've said ATI is crap and nvidia is the way to go for linux users - but now I've got to revise my opinions. The 2D performance of the nvidia driver these days is really sluggish, so annoying that I prefer the nouveau driver for most common tasks. I hope nouveau gains some 3D acceleration support soon.

But ATI is really shaping up as the video card vendor of choice for linux users, and I never thought I'd say that. I got my current work desktop, an HP Compaq DC7800p, in 2008, and so I immediately wiped the disk and installed Linux. It needed the proprietary ATI driver to have any decent 3D support, but once that was done, it worked well.

Last month I upgraded to a recent version of Linux, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the 3D cube and all the compiz effects were fully operational with the default radeon driver - no fglrx binary blob needed.

At home I have one desktop with an nvidia card and one with intel. The intel works well, out of the box, and the nvidia, well, it has decent 3D performance once the blob is loaded. Next time I buy a video card or a new system, I'll go with either ATI or Intel video.

There are some good stuff from ATI since they bought by AMD. Before they were power hungry, but at the moment they generally have better performance per watt vs NVidia competition http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_6870_Turbo/...

Recently, using the proprietary NVidia driver, Firefox is showing 'trailing stripes' when scrolling sometimes. Not sure if it's the driver, FF or Xorg, but still annoying though.