On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote:
> On December 5, 2013, Michael Torrie wrote: > [...] > > Mint seems to be gaining in popularity because 1) it doesn't have Unity > > > and 2) it gives other desktop environments like LXDE and XFCE and Mate > > > more first-class attention (KDE used to be supported but that's now > > > forked off into its own distro, SolidXK. > > > > Okay. I guess that shows how long I've been out of the game, but What is > Unity? From what I can gather it seems to be a display environment/window > manager ala KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc... but if is, why is it so hated? What was > it intended to do that it's apparently not doing? > Unity is a Desktop Shell which was designed to work on desktop, phones, tablets and other computing devices through different modes that adapt to the environment Unity is running in. This will become especially important when we will be able to use our overpowered smartphones as desktop/laptop replacement by hooking it into a display and attaching a BT keyboard, aka "device convergence" The intended benefit is that the User Experience is the same across all the formfactors by retaining all the key UI elements (launcher, dash, switcher, etc). Nobody out there has done this well (e.g. MacOS vs iOS, Android vs ChromeOS) and Ubuntu is trying to do a good job there. The input for all that is extensive user research where design concepts are put in front of users and are then iterated based on their feedback. A lot of the design features first seen on Unity are creeping into other OSes, e.g. MacOS' renewed notifications or Google Hangouts triangle indicators for active users/plugins. In addition, Unity features "scopes" which provide an extension mechanism for additional local or remote data source, think of a plugin that gets a query string and spits out json which is then rendered in the "dash", an overlay menu for quick access to local and remote data. The most controversial "data provider" is the so called "Amazon lens", where Unity tries to give you proposals to a search string that seem relevant. This is mostly intended for media content, e.g. search for "metallica" and get your local music and the new album from Amazon, which can be purchased via Ubuntu One or Amazon. Either case will generate affiliate revenue that will help sponsor Ubuntu. The criticized concerns around security have been addressed and using affiliate revenue to sponsor a project is quite common amongst Linux distributions (think of default search engines in the default browser of any OS). Unity will ship in version 7.x in 14.04. That version is based on a toolkit Nux that Canonical has sponsored/developed. Going forward (Ubuntu Touch 13.10 and ongoing, Ubuntu 14.10 and ongoing) Unity will ship in version 8, a rewrite and rearchitecture to address earlier concerns (speed, resource consumption, design/usability) which is based on Qt/QML, Ubuntu's toolkit of choice. hth Olli /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
