Sabayon and Unity Interface

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Steve

On 31/05/11 01:04 PM, Rippl, Steve wrote:
> There's a thread running at the moment about current versions of
> Ubuntu/Edubuntu and their respective support for things, but I'm
> specifically interested in (concerned about) the new Unity UI and the
> profile lockdown tool Sabayon in future LTS versions.

Where is this thread if I may ask?

> We've been running pure thin clients (no local apps) in our school district
> for a few years now and things are working really very well.  A key part to
> it is the fact that Sabayon has worked properly recently.  We're currently
> on 10.04 and haven't tested anything later than that yet, but a brief Google
> does show up bugs filed against Sabayon to say it isn't working with Unity.
>  Now I know that currently you can revert back to the regular Gnome 2, but
> what's the direction for 12.04 and 14.04, I don't imagine Gnome 2 will
> continue to be around for ever?!  Is there a commitment in the Edubuntu team
> to keep Sabayon working as well as it does now (in 10.04)?  We really rely
> on it!

The Gnome 2 series has been abandoned upstream, so it is indeed going
away in future releases, which pretty much leaves Gnome 3 and Unity for
the gnome-based desktops (how 'gnomey' unity is is debatable, but that's
another discussion entirely).

If Unity and Gnome 3 has lock down features configurable through
gconf/dcond/gsettings/etc, then it shouldn't be too hard getting it into
Sabayon. Unity upstream is quite responsive to bug reports, so a good
exercise would be to check what can actually be locked down in Unity
currently and file bugs for the things that can't. In it's current state
(which is probably more of a bug than a feature) Unity isn't very
customizable anyway. It would also be nice to know the most important
features you use in Sabayon. Not sure how great xnest/xephyr/etc will
work with Unity 3D, but also worth testing.

>From the Edubuntu development team we can't really make a hard
commitment, but we take feedback from the community very seriously
(pretty much everything we've been working on the last 2 years have been
based exclusively on user requests) and it's early in the development
cycle so we can at least put priority to it and make some noise about it
and even hopefully get some people excited about it and get them to
contribute to it.

Otherwise, thanks for your e-mail, the feedback is greatly appreciated!

-Jonathan