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

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.

Comments

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I want this?

and... the rest of use keep using Cinnamon or MATE

[Dakiraun]

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."

I hate to say it but...

[grimmjeeper]

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 your tablet more flexible and expandable with a detatchable keyboard but it's still a tablet. It needs a "pure" tablet operating system. The last thing you want to do is take a desktop operating system and slap a tablet UI on it.

I use Unity. It's OK.

[Qbertino]

I use Unity. There, I said it. Said it before, in fact.

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.

Re:Ugh

[BitZtream]

Someone tell this guy, the entire Linux community has spoken... we do not want this.

I disagree. I certainly want this.

I want my phone to have a Thunderbolt port on it for docking. I want to carry it with me all the time, and when I get to certain places like my desk at work or my desk at home, I want to plug in the thunderbolt cable and have my desktop with me right then and there.

I want my phone to function just like my iPhone when its not connected to a keyboard and mouse.

I want my phone to function just like OS X when using a keyboard, mouse/trackpad, standard sized monitor instead of the phone form factor.

I want it to switch seamlessly between the two.

I want developers to make apps that can do the transition seamlessly.

I want to be able to carry one device in my pocket that serves as my desktop and as my phone, and in the mean time, I'll accept some trade offs to do so, such as running Linux for my phone/desktop if they beat OS X to the punch.

Seriously, what don't you get

No, seriously, YOU DON'T GET IT. People whining when something changes is why Linux has no adoption on the desktop. Your crappy ways of computing are not the ways that everyone else wants to do it. Just because you pull up a page thats gathers its states by looking at the viewers of the page ... which are all a bunch of curmudgeons trying to prove they're old school is the best school doesn't mean it represents the general user base.

You want to be stuck in the past with an inflexible UI, fine, stop upgrading your software. When you decide to accept that software has a whole lot of growth before it stabilizes, then you can join the rest of us in using newer software.

The solution for you is simple, don't upgrade. Stop dragging everyone else down because you can't cope with progress.