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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.
When I saw the screenshots for Unity I was amazed. Finally defaults that make sense. I'm not a fan of dark themes, but that's easily changed. (e.g., in Lucid, switch from Ambience to Radiance.) There's no reason Unity should be limited to netbooks at all. In a world where widescreen monitors are commonplace, vertical space is always at a premium.
But Unity does more than fix the vertical spacing issue, it brings Ubuntu's default's into the 21st century with task management as well. Even Windows has moved on from it's old school taskbar into something resembling the Dock from OSX. Unity's dock is a step in the right direction and placing it on the left is a smart choice.
Unity should be what all Ubuntu versions ship with. Not just netbooks.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Widescreen monitors waste tons of horizontal space and suffer a real lack of vertical space.
I say move both tool bars to the sides. If gnome panel would rotate the words and icons I would already do this.
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.
I run with the "launcher" panel on the left and the applicaion panel on the right.
Both are auto-hide. This gives an lot of screen space on widescreen monitors.
The big pain is the few icons that don't translate well to the side panels.
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.
We wanted to be surfing the web in under 10 seconds, and give people a fantastic web experience. We also wanted it to be possible to upgrade from that limited usage model to a full desktop.
That's a strange definition of "instant." 10 seconds.
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.
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)
8th line of the summary:
Second, we'll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, [...]
The problem: vertical space is limited.
Quick hack: put toolbars on the sides.
True fix: get a rotatable monitor!
When I tried that with my laptop, it only worked once.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Horizontal space is cheap, unless you decide to run two applications side-by-side. This is a scenario which is extremely common for people who are writing a document (HTML, Latex, most programming languages, maybe also 3d editors) and like to have a preview of what they're writing/drawing/programming. Unfortunately, despite widescreens turning more and more popular, window managers do not seem to have caught on the trend. AFAICT, only with some obscure tiling window managers such as Awesome and Xmonad or some scripting uber-hacks can you have two applications side-by-side without resizing them manually every time (which is a PITA). Thanks Ubuntu, neat idea, but I would rather have the toolbars on the top and bottom, and some support for tiling horizzontally side-by-side two windows.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
A widescreen monitor turned sideways is truly awesome if you play vertical shooters (quite common under the MAME emulator).
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Are jealous because your OS X box takes 20 minutes to boot?
Here you go ....
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