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."

Comments

Interesting concept

[bsDaemon]

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.

Unity just for netbooks? Should be default!

[Kethinov]

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.

Brilliant!

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:Brilliant!

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:Brilliant!

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, widescreen is rubbish for some purposes, and actually we'd prefer 4:3.
Trying to "fix" the widescreen problem with software is just hacking around the fundamental lack of choice in screen formats now.

Re:Brilliant!

[apoc.famine]

Same here. It started with my netbook, as I tried desperately to maximize vertical space so that I could actually read pdfs and long web pages. From there it trickled into my main machine.

One of the nice things I found to hack this together is Tree-Style Tabs for Firefox. Puts the tabs on the left and branches them from the tab that spawned them. That's the best way to organize tabs that I've ever seen.

Re:Brilliant!

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Doing touch screens right... for lefties

[wiredlogic]

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

[TheMeuge]

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.

Re:File management

[MonsterTrimble]

From the blog:

The two primary pieces we need to put in place are:

Support for many more applications, and adding / removing applications. Instant-on environments are locked down, while netbook environments should support anybody’s applications, not just those favored in the Launcher.

Support for file management, necessary for an environment that will be the primary working space for the user rather than an occasional web-focused stopover.

Emphasis mine. If this thing is going to fly at all, they'll need file management. It's that simple.

Re:File management

[dgatwood]

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

[jedidiah]

> 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.

This reminds me of the Mac Girl that decided to burn CDs of her pictures because they were becoming too much to manage in iPhoto.

Hiding the filesystem is fine until you find that your forced alternative doesn't scale quite well enough any more.

It's absurd to get rid of a useful framework just because it's not "universal" enough.

If anything, things should go in the other direction. subsets of data and metadata should be accessable in the filesystem or to the shell with simple tools. There should be more explosure of the data rather than less. A vfs interface for the mail system could actually be a pretty handy thing. Perhaps it would even enable a "delete all text messages" feature in the iPhone.

Such an abstraction doesn't even need to be exposed to the end user most times. At least it's there, those that find the default tools lacking have some recourse.

Interesting things should not be impossible. Neither should the inevitable tech support.

Re:File management

[h4rr4r]

What is not a file? A big part of the whole *n.x ideology is that everything is a file.

Emails are files in the MAILDIR, database records are indeed stored in the DB files. Do you think this is magic here?

Not keen on Ubuntu's direction.

[jd]

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.

[stickystyle]

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.

Re:This does not address the real problem.

[Stormwatch]

A widescreen monitor turned sideways is truly awesome if you play vertical shooters (quite common under the MAME emulator).

Re:Uhm?

[McGiraf]

Are jealous because your OS X box takes 20 minutes to boot?

Here you go ....