Slashdot Mirror


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.

18 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. I see what you did there! by jenningsthecat · · Score: 2

    A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  2. Oxymoron? by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 2

    Isn't pure linux a contradiction in terms?

    1. Re: Oxymoron? by jd2112 · · Score: 3, Funny

      My first reaction to the headline was "Is a bash shell really an ideal interface for a phone or tablet? "
      cat phonelist|grep bob|dial

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    2. Re: Oxymoron? by simm_s · · Score: 2

      Yeah I would need to launch minicom and send AT commands to the cell modem. I can't wait! :-)

  3. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I want this?

  4. if they want to impress me, by gTsiros · · Score: 2

    it better switch to desktop mode when i plug in mouse+keyboard on my Z ultra.

    --
    Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
  5. Re:Mint Debian by oodaloop · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah, it wanted to be Metro so bad, it went back in time and came out years before Metro just so it could be even more Metro than Metro. THAT's how bad it wanted to be Metro.

    --
    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  6. Re:Mint Debian by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Metro came from the Zune's UI design which predates Unity.

  7. pure? by rossdee · · Score: 2

    Back in the day a command was pure if it could be made resident in memory and called repeatedly without having to be reloaded from disk.

  8. Re:Mint Debian by spike+hay · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The vast majority of linux users use Ubuntu, with Unity (they don't know what XFCE is). They just don't post on Slashdot. Take a look at this Google Trends frequency of search terms here.

    Mint barely registers compared to Ubuntu. (Also, distrowatch really is useless).

    The only people I know (aside from a few sysadmins with RHEL) that run another distro are my parents, because I put Mint on their computer. I just use FreeBSD now.

    --
    If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
  9. Re:Ugh by aaronb1138 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Android is an objectively bad OS. It's designed for mobile devices and commits the great sin of failing to be parsimonious with computing resources.

    I am a current Android user (Galaxy S4) and have always championed it over iPhone due to the greater device control and options. I'm getting off that train with my next phone purchase. The last nail in the coffin was getting to see a heads up comparison of battery life of HTC One M8 Android vs WP 8. Previously it was easy to dismiss WP 8's battery life on underpowered CPUs and lots of crazy tweaks by Nokia engineers. Now the truth is out, that Android is just a sluggish OS due to poor optimization and the ignorant insistence of using scripting language / virtualized code everywhere instead of compiling for the target.

  10. Re:Mint Debian by Sqr(twg) · · Score: 2

    I use Mint on my desktop, but write "Ubuntu" when I search on google. I think a lot of people do this.

    You get more/better hits when you search for "Ubuntu" and the proposed solution will work on Mint 99.9 % of the time.

  11. Re:Ugh by unrtst · · Score: 2

    Laptops with touchscreens make perfect sense.

    Some of us... Some of us... Some of us...

    You're not even trying to pretend there is a majority, let alone a small enough group of those that do want a touchscreen to make supporting one viable.

    Some of us don't like holding our arm out in mid-air just to move the pointer and to select things.

    I know of no desktop nor laptop with a touchscreen that lacks a secondary pointing device. Sure, you could make one that way, but you'd have to do so purposefully. Augment your pointer usage with a touchscreen and it can be very useful, especially on a laptop.

    On a laptop sans-touchscreen, there are many times I just want to jab at the screen to hit some button or notification, rather than have to move my mouse around to get to it (via crappy touchpad or nub). Even if you have a mouse attached, a quick jab to the screen right where the button is will be faster than moving your hand to the mouse and moving it around and clicking and them coming back to the keyboard. It's perfectly workable to live without a touchscreen, but let's not pretend that it's a negative.

    AFAICT, marks on the screen are the only real downside to adding a touchscreen. I don't eat cheetos while typing, so it's not much of a problem for me, and certainly nothing that a quick wipe down won't cure/mitigate.

    That said, it'd be useless on my desktop because, as you noted, it's too far away. Dual 30" monitors aren't really the norm either though.
    On a tablet or phone, I think we're all fine with the touchscreen (though I still prefer a hardware keyboard.... wish more phone models had them).

  12. I use Unity. It's OK. by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  13. No, Windows 8 pulled a Unity, not the reverse by xeno · · Score: 2

    OP gets things turned around: Canonical released the Unity interface for Ubuntu in the summer of 2010, and then made it the mandatory desktop on Ubuntu in mid-2011 sparking an exodus of users to other distros, Windows, and OSX. Without getting into some curious timing... Just about a year later in the summer of 2012, Microsoft released the Metro interface for Windows 8, copying many of the tiled UI ideas and touch/gesture-on-the-desktop that had been rejected by more geeky and novice users alike -- only this time into a far larger market.

    Honestly, from inside Redmond it was very strange to watch this happen, with a lot of people asking 'what the hell are we doing?' and variations on 'didn't the little guy fall on his face when he tried this?' The parallels were almost comical; with Ballmer and Sinofsky insisting that "customers like this!" in words almost identical to Shuttleworth two years earlier, and similar expressions of dismay and denial of the humiliating reception that followed. Though Ballmer and Sinofsky wielded market power Shuttleworth could only dream of, the outcomes were predictable and there had been plenty of warning. The hard part for these guys to accept is that when your ideas are so thoroughly rejected by people/consumers/end users -- and you keep doing the unwanted thing anyway -- it's not like the audience remains as motivated to see what you come up with next**. They just start ignoring you.

    ** (even if the very same UI concepts work well in another context -- in this case, on a mobile handset)

    .

    --
    I think not...(*poof*)
  14. Re:Mint Debian by Lumpy · · Score: 2

    The scary part is that for everu Ubuntu user there is 10 Chromebook users. Ubuntu needs to stop dinking around and start selling a cheap netbook with ubuntu on it. The problem is that ubuntu needs an i5 with decent video card to be useable. They have bloated the hell out of linux.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  15. Re:Ugh by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  16. Re: Mint Debian by Threni · · Score: 2

    No. Look at distrowatch. Unity promoted millions of users over to Mint, with its choice of sane front ends.