Preview of Ubuntu's Unity Interface

itwbennett writes "In late October we learned that starting with the next release (11.04), Ubuntu would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Now we know a bit more about what that will (and won't) mean for users. The move to Unity doesn't mean that Ubuntu is abandoning GNOME. It also doesn't mean that users will be forced to use Unity; they'll still be able to revert to the old GNOME interface. What it does mean, mainly, is that users will be presented with a simple interface — probably too simple for nuts and bolts types. The more 'radical shift' will be switching Ubuntu's base graphics system from the X Window System to Wayland. There users can expect that it will take some time before things are in working order. 'In other words,' says Steven Vaughan-Nichols who reviewed Unity for ITworld, 'Wayland will be an option, and one that only people who don't mind having their desktops blow up on a regular basis should fool with, in Ubuntu 11.04. By Ubuntu 11.10, it will be workable, and come the spring release two years from now, Ubuntu 12.04, we should, if all goes well, see a stable Wayland-based Unity desktop.'"

Comments

Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea

[Ynot_82]

From the Wayland FAQ
https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions

Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to acheive. This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

Re:It's the Apps stupid.

[MBGMorden]

Apps usually don't talk directly to X11. The GUI toolkit does. If Ubuntu can get QT and GTK+ ported to Wayland (which has already been underway for a while) then most apps are merely a recompile (plus some minor tweaking) away from being native Wayland apps. Kinda like how many GTK+ or QT apps have fully functional windows versions because those toolkits were ported to Windows.

Re:It's the Apps stupid.

[Abcd1234]

Are there any Wayland native apps yet?

There doesn't need to be. Just provide an X server on top of the Wayland graphics engine, and continue to use your old X apps. This allows for an easy transition to Wayland for those apps that would benefit from it.

Furthermore, if you implement said support down at the toolkit level (ie, Gtk and Qt), the apps needn't even realize they're running over Wayland.

Re:It's the Apps stupid.

[Abcd1234]

Apps usually don't talk directly to X11. The GUI toolkit does. If Ubuntu can get QT and GTK+ ported to Wayland (which has already been underway for a while) then most apps are merely a recompile (plus some minor tweaking) away from being native Wayland apps.

You don't even need to recompile. Those apps are dynamically linked to their respective toolkit libraries. So long as the libraries maintain ABI compatibility, they can implement a new rendering subsystem, and the apps would never know.

Re:Huh?

[Em Ellel]

Confusing? X is the server, and handles connections to it telling it what to display. Like httpd (apache) is a server and handles a Web client telling it what Web page to send down the pipe. People weren't confused running the Tetrinet server, seeing the clients connect to them and output images to the screen; but they're confused running the X server, seeing the clients connect?

It is confusing because while it makes sense from point of view of the X protocol, from the point of view of the user, the "server" appears to be the client and the "client" appears to be the server. If I connect to server and request an image - in the http protocol, I connect to a server(apache), and it shows content on the client(browser). However if I am doing the same thing using X, it appears as if I connect to server(remote system), and request to show an image, and it shows content on client(my display or X-Server). What is actually happening is that the remote server's program is the client that requests to display things on the server - but that is not what the user sees. Thus the confusion of so many people, which is understandable as it is not the most logical thing unless you understand the X protocol.

-Em