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Ubuntu GUI Linux

Unity 8 Will Bring 'Pure' Linux Experience To Mobile Devices 125

Posted by timothy from the context-sensitive dept.
sfcrazy writes If you have tried the live images of Ubuntu Next you may worry that Canonical is trying to do a Windows 8 with Ubuntu. That's not true. There is no need to worry though: A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however. Will Cooke of Canonical clarifies: "We are trying to make it clear that Unity 8 desktop will look like the traditional desktop and will behave like a normal desktop. We are very aware that our users expect a normal desktop there."

Unity 8 will offer the traditional desktop interface when it detects a desktop. The same OS will switch to a touch-based interface on touch-based devices such as tablets and smartphones.
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Unity 8 Will Bring 'Pure' Linux Experience To Mobile Devices More

Unity 8 Will Bring 'Pure' Linux Experience To Mobile Devices

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  • I see what you did there! (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @10:21AM (#48555467)

    A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however.

  • Oxymoron? (Score:3)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @10:22AM (#48555475)

    Isn't pure linux a contradiction in terms?

    • Re: Oxymoron? (Score:4, Funny)

      by jd2112 ( 1535857 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @10:51AM (#48555795)
      My first reaction to the headline was "Is a bash shell really an ideal interface for a phone or tablet? "
      cat phonelist|grep bob|dial

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by simm_s ( 11519 )

        Yeah I would need to launch minicom and send AT commands to the cell modem. I can't wait! :-)

      • You get the Useless Use of Cat Award

        http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/awar... [smallo.ruhr.de]

        cat is for conCATenating multiple files.

        grep bob phonelist | dial

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Trepidity ( 597 )

          Imo the version you present is clearly inferior. For one it's ugly, breaking the left-to-right dataflow nature of shell pipelines. For two it requires more tedious line-editing if you change out the source, e.g. if phonelist is encrypted, with the previous version you just replace "cat" with "zcat", whereas with your version you have to rearrange the commands. "cat" in this case just functions as a noop data source, like a 'dac' node in a Max/MSP graph. Overloading the first command in the pipeline with spe

          • Actually it IS faster. Execution is faster by time cat phonelist >/dev/null, and faster to type (fewer characters) .

            Pairs are inherently more elegant than triples, and cat is the third wheel. Nature abounds with pairs, there are few tonno triples in nature. Computer science abounds with pairs; key>value, etc. Key > value arrays are fundamental, there is no common "third wheel > key > value" type, because it's inelegant and ugly.

      • Bash? Bah. I thought we were talking a a *pure* experience, why would you use such a newgfangled POS interface?

    • I love how the claim they make is that they're bringing the desktop experience to mobile. They're not. They redefined their desktop experience into some horrid mobile UI, and now that they're actually putting that mobile UI where it belongs, they can claim that they're delivering the desktop UI on mobile.

  • Mint Debian (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All 3 Unity users must be thrilled.

    • Re:Mint Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spike hay ( 534165 ) <blu_ice AT violate DOT me DOT uk> on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @11:06AM (#48555957) Homepage

      The vast majority of linux users use Ubuntu, with Unity (they don't know what XFCE is). They just don't post on Slashdot. Take a look at this Google Trends frequency of search terms here [google.com].

      Mint barely registers compared to Ubuntu. (Also, distrowatch really is useless).

      The only people I know (aside from a few sysadmins with RHEL) that run another distro are my parents, because I put Mint on their computer. I just use FreeBSD now.

      • I use Mint on my desktop, but write "Ubuntu" when I search on google. I think a lot of people do this.

        You get more/better hits when you search for "Ubuntu" and the proposed solution will work on Mint 99.9 % of the time.

        • 99.9% may be overstating it a little. I just updated a Mint install, and the way I chose was to manually edit the PPAs by replacing all the references to Ubuntu Quantal with Ubuntu Trusty, running a 3 hour update in the graphics mode, then looking at what was now the new download sources list and editing it again for the sources that had changed naming conventions and weren't being found, looking up source PPAs online for them, etc and running a second update which also added another two hours. This is not

        • I have a hard time believing that accounts for a significant percentage of Ubuntu's search volume. If both had the same popularity, for example, and even one third of people wanting info about Mint searched for "Linux Mint," if Ubuntu had a search volume of 166, then Mint would have a search volume of 33. This is a much smaller relative disparity than actually seen. And the likely case is that while some people searching for Mint information query for Ubuntu, most are still going to search for Mint.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        The scary part is that for everu Ubuntu user there is 10 Chromebook users. Ubuntu needs to stop dinking around and start selling a cheap netbook with ubuntu on it. The problem is that ubuntu needs an i5 with decent video card to be useable. They have bloated the hell out of linux.

        • The problem is that ubuntu needs an i5 with decent video card to be useable.

          Ubuntu with Unity, perhaps. But since three years ago when I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop, I have had no major problems running it on a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012 with an Atom N450 and 1 GB of RAM.

          • Yeah. Running Lubuntu 14.04 on old HP Mini with Atom n270, 2 g ram, and SSD. It's responsive and usable...unlike how it was with XP or Ubuntu+Unity where it would bog down for 30-60 seconds at times for no apparent reason.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

              I'm running Lubuntu on a $200 Chromebook right now. Works pretty great, except a little wonkiness with suspend/resume & bluetooth connectivity.

              If Ubuntu got its stuff together, it could sell capable Ubuntu laptops in the sub-$250 market.

      • No. Look at distrowatch. Unity promoted millions of users over to Mint, with its choice of sane front ends.

        • Distrowatch numbers don't even begin to matter. I thought that was a well established fact now.

        • Are you fucking kidding me? I have no idea why people ever think of Distrowatch as mattering. All that it measures is page hits to Distrowatch's info page about that distro. It only measures what people who go to Distrowatch click on at Distrowatch. Notice that the numbers are in the low thousands per month at best. Their audience is longer-time Linux users who remember it from like fifteen years ago.

          Google search volumes are by far a more accurate gauge of interest, as it is both a much larger sample, and

      • Google Groups is a good indicator about distros popularity too.

  • if they want to impress me, (Score:3)

    by gTsiros ( 205624 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @10:39AM (#48555665)

    it better switch to desktop mode when i plug in mouse+keyboard on my Z ultra.

  • So will next year be the year of the desktop on Linux?

    • So will next year be the year of the desktop on Linux?

      The obligatory answer is no.
      But that's okay, you know,
      Because the desktop, like BSD
      Is dying, so you see,
      It's Canonical's usual "all talk, no show".
      Burma Shave

  • So... basically "Don't worry - the least-liked Linux shell will continue to have all the things you hate and that drove you away from Ubuntu ages ago."

    • So... basically "Don't worry - the least-liked Linux shell will continue to have all the things you hate and that drove you away from Ubuntu ages ago."

      At least give them points for being consistent.

  • pure? (Score:3)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @11:01AM (#48555915)

    Back in the day a command was pure if it could be made resident in memory and called repeatedly without having to be reloaded from disk.

  • currently there are a number of 32bit tablets running windows 8 and they are remarkably cheap if lacking a little in the ram department.

    These tablets would be great for Linux if it was possible to run on any of them. £150 with windows 8.1, with a proper linux distro. I would buy one, i might even dual boot it if there was enough space. I wouldn't even begrudge buying an iso file from canonical at a reasonable price if the hardware was fully supported.

    There is work being done to support some of t

  • That likely means you have to memorize how 350 different 2-letter-abbreviated command-line utilites work along with 17 or so switches each one has... Everybody will flock to do that.

  • Apple got it right. They made one operating system for their desktop. It's a "pure" desktop operating system. Their mobile device operating system is an entirely different operating system. The two can work together but they are entirely different operating systems for entirely different platforms that serve entirely different roles. This farcical attempt to make one operating system for every type of device leaves you with all of the compromises you don't need to make. It's fine if you want to make y

  • If you have tried the live images of Ubuntu Next you may worry that Canonical is trying to do a Windows 8 with Ubuntu. That's not true.

    Oh, good, so no need to worry then.

    There is no need to worry though

    You just told me there was no need to worry when you said it wasn't true; now I'm worried that you keep telling me not to worry.

  • I use Unity. It's OK. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @12:05PM (#48556357)

    I use Unity. There, I said it. Said it before, in fact. [slashdot.org]

    Unity is buggy. Quite buggy, to be honest. Compiz sucks - it has since the beginning - and Keyboard behavior is sometimes erratic right up to unusable.

    However, I get the overall concept of unity and I think it's a good one. My Mom can use it, which is a good sighn. And it's not nearly as intimidating as the crap we see on other desktops.

    This summer I've gotten myself a 15" ThinkPad, installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it and bought a Logitech Performance MX mouse to operate all the extra expose functions and stuff as I'm used to on my Mac at work. It's cool. For a FOSS based OS it is really neat - can't complain about that.

    That said, it's far from primetime, especially since the hardware integration is no where near the experience you get with the fruit company.

    I do hope to see a full-blown convergence device based on linux one day - if it's unity based and they've fixed the glaring bugs until then, I'd have no problem with that either.

    My 2 cents.

    • I was just too lazy to switch until the past few months, where all that effort trying to work around the interface built up to the point where I got fed up. I didn't mind trying out a new way to do things, found shortcuts that helped my workflow, and definitely gave Unity a fair shake. I just found my ire building up, instead of what was promised to me which was an improvement that I might have to learn to appreciate. Sticking with it since its introduction, I just haven't found that promise to come true

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JanneM ( 7445 )

      I pretty much agree. I'm an old-time Unix and Linux user, but Unity works pretty well for me. It mostly manages to get out of the way of my work - the single most important feature of any desktop - and things such as the single menu gives me vertical space for another line or two worth of visible code.

      There are some real irritants. The window/app switcher has never gotten the distinction right (and I don't think it's possible), and the quick search misses things it should find. But these are smaller irritan

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DUdsen ( 545226 )

      I use Unity. There, I said it. Said it before, in fact. [slashdot.org]

      Unity is buggy. Quite buggy, to be honest. Compiz sucks - it has since the beginning - and Keyboard behavior is sometimes erratic right up to unusable.

      However, I get the overall concept of unity and I think it's a good one. My Mom can use it, which is a good sighn. And it's not nearly as intimidating as the crap we see on other desktops.

      Does any of the GTK3 based desktop environments actually work? Gnome3 made unity look good in comparison, And Cinnamon does not seams to be fully stable yet either. It will be interested to see how many users XFCE bleed to lxde when/if they make the move, unity8 touch is also QT based where as im unsure when or if they move the desktop version to QT. LXDE is abandoning GTK entirely for QT and will not be moving to GTK3.

      • My general take on this is that things like Cinnamon & MATE were knee-jerk reactions to GNOME 3 created purely for design reasons, with no real technical backing, and no appreciation for the amount of work which actually goes into creating a complete, properly integrated desktop and toolkit. Unsurprisingly, despite looking pretty, reports continue to crop up about them not quite working right. I'm honestly surprised MATE is still going, and whilst I wish them luck, there *were* real technical problems

  • No, Windows 8 pulled a Unity, not the reverse (Score:3)

    by xeno ( 2667 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @12:06PM (#48556367)

    OP gets things turned around: Canonical released the Unity interface for Ubuntu in the summer of 2010, and then made it the mandatory desktop on Ubuntu in mid-2011 sparking an exodus of users to other distros, Windows, and OSX. Without getting into some curious timing... Just about a year later in the summer of 2012, Microsoft released the Metro interface for Windows 8, copying many of the tiled UI ideas and touch/gesture-on-the-desktop that had been rejected by more geeky and novice users alike -- only this time into a far larger market.

    Honestly, from inside Redmond it was very strange to watch this happen, with a lot of people asking 'what the hell are we doing?' and variations on 'didn't the little guy fall on his face when he tried this?' The parallels were almost comical; with Ballmer and Sinofsky insisting that "customers like this!" in words almost identical to Shuttleworth two years earlier, and similar expressions of dismay and denial of the humiliating reception that followed. Though Ballmer and Sinofsky wielded market power Shuttleworth could only dream of, the outcomes were predictable and there had been plenty of warning. The hard part for these guys to accept is that when your ideas are so thoroughly rejected by people/consumers/end users -- and you keep doing the unwanted thing anyway -- it's not like the audience remains as motivated to see what you come up with next**. They just start ignoring you.

    ** (even if the very same UI concepts work well in another context -- in this case, on a mobile handset)

    .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 4pins ( 858270 )

      Please mod parent up!

      • 1: Always run changes by your existing customers.
      • 2: Always look around and see if there is a "case study" for what you are considering.

  • Sorry Canonical but haven't Jolla already stolen your thunder?

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