Slashdot Mirror
Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu
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."
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.
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.
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
What a sane decision. Why not lose the top panel, too? I've been going with a vertical panel (only) in KDE for a long time now. Even before I had a widescreen monitor it saved the "right kind" of space. (KDE 4's taskbar widget automatically strips the text off the buttons at that size/orientation, leaving only icons... they're usually informative enough.)
I've been putting the menu panel at the left side for years (in Gnome and in Windows) both to get the extra vertical space, and just because it makes sense to me. The problem is, Gnome seems to keep making it harder and harder to have it work properly there. The new indicator widgets are wide and don't seem to re-orient vertically, and Gnome Shell (Gnome 3.0) seems to not be able to move the panel to the side at all. I actually just bought a new netbook with better vertical resolution because I was sick of fighting (well, for development IDE's as well). The Unity work being done is the best interface news I've heard in ages.
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.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 !
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.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
A widescreen monitor turned sideways is truly awesome if you play vertical shooters (quite common under the MAME emulator).
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
It's also true for regular Ubuntu I guess, but it just noticed it with the screenshot in TFA for some reason: that whole bar at the top of the screen completely defeats the purpose of Chromium's "tabs at the top of the screen" approach.
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.