For better or worse, it becomes more and more sensible to think about Ubuntu as a separate operating system, built on top of technologies like Linux, Debian or GNOME. Sort of like Android is built on top of Linux and Java, except less extreme, or what HTC and other handset makers are doing on top of Android. And on the more extreme example, one could argue Apple did the same with BSD and Mach.
If the platform is commoditized, it's relatively "easy" for companies to build a new personality in the way they think will add value. Canonical's great push forward was and is realizing that one of the biggest problem with Linux desktop nowadays is UX, and they're trying hard to fix that.
Personally, I prefer GNOME Shell and I think it's going to rock, especially on tablets. I've tried Unity in Maverick on a few netbooks, just for a few minutes each, since it's default for live install image. I do think it lacks polish and stability and, compared to Moblin/Meego, it's still got a long way to go towards tablet friendlyness.
But I love the fact that there are options [0], and that Linux Desktop, aside from never having its year, is a viable platform on which people can experiment and build cool stuff, even if the end users never learn that under this Ubuntu (or Fedora, ...) operating system there's something geeks have holy wars about.
[0] Then there is, obviously, KDE, which a great many people use and love. But this is a comment about GNOME technologies :)
In a year when we've seen iOS increasingly restrict its own ecosystem, limit options it doesn't like (see the current story about Jobs nixing the orientation lock on the iPad) ... and even start to take over The Mighty Desktop (see OS X Lion), that thought is a breath of fresh air.
I think it's a great move. They were wasting time and energy in spats with Gnome. Now they can do what they want with the desktop without anyone getting upset that they are not trying hard enough to work their changes in upstream or adding features that aren't wanted upstream.
No one said they weren't going to include gnome software. This whole new ui issue stems from differences in opinion in UI/UX and there was a lot wasted going back and forth with Gnome about them.
I haven't tried Unity yet because I heard to wasn't quite stable. But from what I saw of a friends laptop who had it installed, it looks PERFECT for netbooks, even tablets (now that we have multi-touch support built in). I think this makes sense seeing as the future of computers (desktops included) will probably be touchable interfaces that can use that kind of layout.
I tried it, unfortunately doesn't seem to work on my laptop :/
I'm not sure what's the deal with it, seems to have some special hardware requirements. I can't fathom what these are, seeing as I have an ATI Radeon video card.
Atom is still x86, but UNR has made some Atom-specific optimizations to the kernel. I don't know the details, but there may be some partial incompatibilities that prevent it working on some non-atom x86 cpus but not others.
I installed 10.04 netbook edition on an old Dell inspiron, and it didn't grumble. Didn't do any subtle animation effects either, but that wasn't a biggie. Was a little slow flipping between the global menu and other apps which was a bit annoying for a 1.5ghz laptop with 512MB of ram! I was alarmed to see the omission of virtual desktops, and menu integration was a little odd. The person who received their updated laptop appears quite chuffed, given the choice again I would have used bog standard Ubuntu, but I was hoping the netbook edition might have some sensible power saving features.
I've tried Unity on my Netbook (under 10.04) and had to revert to the normal desktop.
At the time it wasn't very customizable - to the point where (from memory) I couldn't add a virtual desktop pager and/or command prompt anywhere. On a netbook I rely on virtual desktops, so that kind of killed it for me.
On it's current state it's pretty slow and bloated. Let's hope that on six months they can fix the suck. Kudos for trying something new and not copying OSX or Windows 7.
As well as being slow and bloated, it also seems rather rough around the edges. It doesn't feel like a particularly polished product somehow.
I doubt everything will fixed in six months, but Canonical tend toward the Google model of development; release something rough first, then refine it on the whetstone of user feedback.
But if they invent something completely new, and Apple copies it Apple isn't 'ripping it off,' they are 'making it better' (e.g. 'Time Machine', 'Spotlight', etc).
Please leave these useless, 'OMG! They copied X!' comments off of HN. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants,' is how the tech world moves along.
While we're at it let's leave the drama alone too. I wasn't crying ripoff, I was using it in a design context. And from that POV, the drawing code is almost a per-pixel copy of the Dock's. Which, wouldn't happen by accident.
To be even more fair, Steve Jobs was so impressed by the innovative graphical user interface he had seen at Xerox PARC that he copied many of its features in the original Macintosh.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I wish they would copy Windows 7 a bit... a lot of the features in Win 7 that don't conflict with GNOME are really nice.
Unrelated: GNOME still doesn't understand the concept of "chunking": You only want 5-7 items in a group for people to comprehend it best. When Ubuntu's System > Preferences drop-down has 25 items in it, you have a bad UI.
The flip side of chunking is the equally-bad UI known as "wading through menu trees". I personally prefer not having to deal with finding my way through half a dozen menu levels trying to remember where I found that admin tool that I don't use often enough to build muscle memory. If you want a friendlier UI, install the Control Panel app or whatever it's called that replaces those menus with a categorized list of big, pretty icons.
I absolutely agree that a control panel window is the solution, not drop down menus. Drop downs should only be used for a small number of objects and trees, lest someone move their mouse 2px north of a path and lose ten seconds of careful navigations.
Fingers crossed this encourages Parallels to improve their support of compositing in Ubuntu VMs (since, I assume from another article, Unity required compositing). I've still not yet had it working reliably. Any idea if Parallels 6 works any better?
I've already completely removed gnome-panel in favor of just Gnome-Do and Docky. Don't see the appeal in Unity. Looks like my gnome-panel setup used to: skinny left bar with Talika window list plugin. I don't see the need to have panels to go all the way across a screen dimension anymore.
All I use gnome-panel for is the wifi applet and the the load monitor. I make it auto-hide and bind a key to show it in order to save screen space. But I don't see the appeal of Docky over gnome-panel--isn't it just for launching programs? xbindkeys is way better for that.
i use it just as a windowlist autohiding on bottom to show open programs. I like the UI\feel more than a panel extending across the whole screen. Also, the clock docklet is better than the default gnome-panel system clock. I also really enjoy the Timer docklet as well. I open new programs with Gnome DO by typing and do not pin stuff to it.
Is this a new C api [competing with KDE / QT and GTK] ?
Why not use Javascript/SVG/HTML5 for Linux desktop UI ?
It will happen eventually, anyway, Im not the only person saying this.
The browser stack is a better alternative to X-Windows protocol, on balance - you can keep the advantages of client/server separation by using ajax+websockets.
Or go the Node.js route and expose OS parts as Javascript API.
Either way you'll have an environment many more people will enjoy hacking UI on, and therefore better chance of improving Linux desktop.
Although its open source, its still another API that is used nowhere else.. so its expensive for a developer to jump in.
Unity (and GNOME Shell for that matter) is probably best described as a "shell" rather than a window manager.
Like the old school GNOME Panel (and taskbar in Windows, Dock in OS X), the shell is for launching things, the entry point to getting your computer to do things.
Both Unity and GNOME Shell rely on an external window manager, albeit in an interesting way: They are plugins for mutter (a Clutter-based version of Metacity). When Unity switches to Compiz, it may be as a plugin or as a separate processs, not sure.
"Unity brings together a powerful set of technologies designed to empower application developers and deliver a unique user experience"
From the above hype I mistakenly assumed Unity was something other than a nice Window Manager. Perhaps I do deserve to be down-voted for not wading thru pages of this tripe to find out what it actually means.
My comments still stand : Even if Unity is a superb WM .. does the Linux desktop really need another?
HTML5 would be a better way to do Linux Desktop UI.
If the platform is commoditized, it's relatively "easy" for companies to build a new personality in the way they think will add value. Canonical's great push forward was and is realizing that one of the biggest problem with Linux desktop nowadays is UX, and they're trying hard to fix that.
Personally, I prefer GNOME Shell and I think it's going to rock, especially on tablets. I've tried Unity in Maverick on a few netbooks, just for a few minutes each, since it's default for live install image. I do think it lacks polish and stability and, compared to Moblin/Meego, it's still got a long way to go towards tablet friendlyness.
But I love the fact that there are options [0], and that Linux Desktop, aside from never having its year, is a viable platform on which people can experiment and build cool stuff, even if the end users never learn that under this Ubuntu (or Fedora, ...) operating system there's something geeks have holy wars about.
[0] Then there is, obviously, KDE, which a great many people use and love. But this is a comment about GNOME technologies :)
EDIT: markup