Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu 251
Today at the Ubuntu Developers Summit, Mark Shuttleworth presented a few upcoming Ubuntu projects, including "Light" versions of the operating system for "both netbook and desktop, that are optimized for dual-boot scenarios." Shuttleworth also took the wraps off Unity, a new lightweight interface that will be included in Ubuntu Light and eventually in Ubuntu Netbook Edition as well. "First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications. That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world. ... Second, we'll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, we can afford to be more generous with the icon size there. ... Third, we will make the top panel smarter." Ars got a chance to try out a prototype of Unity, saying, "Its unique visual style melds beautifully with Ubuntu's new default theme and its underlying interaction model seems compelling and well-suited for small screens."
Interesting concept (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how I'd like this in action, but I'm glad that they're at least trying a somewhat new direction with the 'Unity' interface, rather than the typical scenario of playing catchup with Windows and OS X that the open-source desktops seem to usually do. Even if it doesn't work out, at least it should hopefully encourage further innovation and something to actually set Linux, or specifically Ubuntu, apart from the crowd. The whole "free alternative to..." approach really hasn't been a selling point since the battle for the server room against the commercial Unix vendors 10+ years ago.
Ubuntu Side By Side With OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently I was visiting a friend who use to work at Apple in the Human Interface Group some time ago and he had two of his machines setup side by side. One was OS X and the other was the latest Ubuntu.
He sat there for a good hour going through painstaking detail of simple desktop operations and just how mind boggling bad Ubuntu/Gnome is in comparision. Many of the things I already knew from my own experience but it was shocking to have them put forth in such a direct and obvious light.
Maybe everyone overestimated just what Canonical was going to do with Linux, but one has to wonder what exactly do they do all day there? My Apple friend was describing the teams of people he worked with on OS X and it wasn't some vast army of developers. It is hard to imagine that Canonical can't even get something remotely close to Apple's OS X interface technology with the employees they have.
Doing touch screens right... for lefties (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if they could make the effort to implement a touch based layout without biasing against lefties. This is a significant annoyance especially with traditional mouse oriented controls like scroll bars. To do this right requires a design that minimizes the occurrence of the hand covering the screen while performing touch operations. Usually what happens is a system is designed assuming right handedness and the result is awkward to use for lefties. Ideally, applications and the window manager will dynamically change based on a user hand preference.
File management (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubuntu Light will not have any traditional file management and it will come with a few applications installed for web, media, mail etc.
This is what really caught my eye.
From the iPhone to the new Ubuntu, the wet dream of Hollywood and RIAA - a closed user-inaccessible file system seems to be making the rounds everywhere, including (evidently) in open source. It seem to be a part of an overall push not just to wring the last bits of control from the hands of the users, but to ensure that the users will be content consumers, not content creators.
Vertical panel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not keen on Ubuntu's direction. (Score:5, Interesting)
No default GNOME shell? Going for lightweight, rather than modular? I don't see this as a logical direction for Ubuntu.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be. The only exception is a daemon or other service that creates a large amount of state at start-time. Then, you simply create your clean image to exclude such services and start them once the image is in place.
An alternative would be to do something similar, but instead of actually loading the software, you load and freeze hooks. This won't be quite as fast, but a frozen image of application hooks and corresponding DLL hooks (and perhaps the filesystem kernel modules) should be small enough to fit into a flash chip. This would "pre-boot" the computer without having to actually parse the init scripts and without having to have a full ramfs boot stage.
In both these cases, I'm picturing that when you change any init script or any of the packages involved, the machine would need to rebuild the fast-boot images. This means that updating low-level packages would place a LOT more strain on the system. On the other hand, disk access is slow, scripts are slow and starting heavier applications is also slow. Cutting two of these three out would massively boost startup times, cutting all three out would be damn-near instant-on.
(You actually could get instant-on with Coreboot + a running system image, and given that thumb drives have a larger capacity than older desktop systems, it's not impossible to imagine having such a system. Oh, and Coreboot works on a hell of a lot of platforms these days, for those who dismiss it as architecture-impaired. It's not perfect and it can be a pain at times as-is, but the one thing it's not short of is supported platforms.)
Re:This does not address the real problem. (Score:1, Interesting)
No, true fix = stop forcing us all to use widescreen screens even when we don't want to.
Next thing you know, they'll be justifying that we all HAVE to have widescreen because all the new desktops are set up that way.
Bring back full screen 4:3 !
Logical (Score:3, Interesting)
Two thoughts:
1) Moving the max/min/close buttons now makes sense.
2) Dash reminds me a LOT of KDE 4's start menu.
I generally like the idea, especially with the goal of allowing KDE apps to seemlessly integrate. I still have issues with using the gnome base when I think LXDE has a far better upside (in my opinion) with respect to low power computing but I hope that Unity does continue to evolve and prosper.
Re:Doing touch screens right... for lefties (Score:4, Interesting)
It was annoying for the first 5 or so years, but now I'm completely used to it.
Lefties are never going to be 100% supported; better to get used to doing things righty, it'll make for a lot less frustration.
Plus, your girlfriend/boyfriend/otherfriend will appreciate your ambidexterity, if you ever get the chance to make use of it.
Re:This does not address the real problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Horizontal vs. vertical space (Score:3, Interesting)
I hide both of my panels by default. The entire screen is then devoted to whatever I'm working on. The only thing I lose is the clock.
Heck, most of the time, I use keyboard-shortcuts to switch between applications, so I don't even need the bottom panel. The top panel is mostly useful for the clock and easy access to NetworkManager. If I could have a shortcut that displayed the time via libosd and a better application-level network manager, I could do away with the panels entirely.
Re:Interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
> I'm not sure how I'd like this in action, but I'm glad that they're at least trying a somewhat new direction with the 'Unity' interface ...
If you'd like to see it in action, there's a short (1:39) video showing this on YouTube: Ubuntu 10.10 Unity Interface. [youtube.com]
Re:File management (Score:5, Interesting)
Not at all. One of the biggest flaws in computer UI design today is that there are lots of things that are not stored as files but are still basically indivisible units of data, whether they're mail messages or database records or... you name it. Because so many of these things are not, in fact, files, a purely file-based view is a fairly clumsy way to represent that content. For most users, they don't need to know or care whether data is in a file or a database record or an email message in an mbox file. Abstracting those details away from the user results in a better user experience with more ability to manage the actual content than a pure file-based interface can provide.
It's not like the filesystem in Ubuntu Light will cease to exist or will become inaccessible to power users. You'll just have to install tools to reach it. At least I assume that this is the case.
Re:File management (Score:4, Interesting)
Being geeks we sometimes fail to notice, but it's also the wet dream of the average consumer. Just the other day I had a conversation with a group of non-geeks in which I mentioned the **AA-driven move away from real computers and towards net-enabled appliances. Every single one of them agreed they would happily ditch their PCs for such a device if they could also do their office work on it.
Re:File management (Score:3, Interesting)
usability... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:File management (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean a N900?
Funny how your post starts with not needing a file manager but ends with requiring a terminal.
Re:Ubuntu Side By Side With OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
Give them a chance, they're only really getting going now. Traditionally this has been an area that Linux has fallen down on. You're welcome to speculate as to the reasons but it seems to me that a lot of people in the community just aren't that excited by making stuff more user-friendly. Not to say that it doesn't interest them at all, it's just that they're more interested in performance and functionality, and so these are the areas in which efforts tend to be focused, meaning that user-friendliness can sometimes take a back seat, however unintentionally. Canonical have only really had a dedicated team focused on UI design for the last year or so, and to be honest those guys have had a bit of a battle with the community, whose hearts are generally in the right place, but a lot of them just don't appreciate the merits of, say, spending An Awful Lot Of Money (you probably wouldn't believe just how much money) on a house font.
I know they're hard at work, though, and I know Mark Shuttleworth thinks it's about the most important hurdle to get over in order for the general public to really take to Ubuntu. I think you're going to see a lot more interesting stuff coming from them over the next while.
(I know some of the people in there, in case you didn't guess)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so brilliant for a netbook, though. Most of them have just enough screen width to get the average website layout working optimally. People design webpages to scroll vertically, not horizontally, so a tiny bit of vertical space is not a big deal. I think the best thing to do would make the menu auto-hide. It wouldn't matter which orientation it was in then.