On 12/07/2013 07:30 AM, Olli Ries wrote: > On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Dan Egli <ddavide...@gmail.com> 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"
I disagree. Why do we need to have the same interface kludged to different interface paradigms? There's absolutely no reason why we couldn't have a mobile UI on the phone and then when we dock it with a monitor and keyboard we get a normal desktop UI. In fact that's exactly what Ubuntu for Android is. On the phone's screen it's standard Android. When docked it's a normal desktop (well, Unity in this case). > <snipped excellent summary of Unity's features> > 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. You missed the biggest and most controversial change: Mir. Unity isn't all bad by any means. I think part of the problem is Canonical's decisions to go their own way in terms of Desktop technologies (Mir, for example), instead of working with the community. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
