Unity design vs. implementation: Nothing can go wrong!

[Paul Sladen]

On Sat, 16 Apr 2011, Samuel Thurston wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 3:06 PM, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem is when you make "big shifts" on this kind of
> timetable, without having prepped the work in the background.

Where Ubuntu has been successful is interative development.  The Unity
design is an interation of the design shipped in UNR/Ubuntu 10.10;
what is unusual in this case is that the *implemenation* has been
written from-scratch, twice.  There are now three Unity codebases:

  1. Unity Clutter/Mutter (aka Ubuntu Netbook ... <= Ubuntu 10.10)
  2. Unity Compiz (aka Unity 3D ... >= Ubuntu 11.04
  3. Unity Qt (aka Unity 2D ... >= Ubuntu 11.04)

Of the three codebases, two have been written from-scratch over the
last release cycle.  So whilst the the Unity interface *design* is
continuing to evolve the code implementations have not had that same
benefit this time around.

Software crashing is an implementation issue, rather than a design
issue.   The work being done by Ayatana is continuing to evolve on an
interative basis;  and for the next release cycle the Unity 2D/3D
codebases will also be iterations of what has gone before.

> When i heard the reasons fedora was dumping unity,

I am not aware of Fedora having planned to ship Unity by default.  Do
you have links/URLs to give better context?

> > I do personally know several people who have dumped Ubuntu, and moved to
> > Debian stable.  Their argument being that they want a workingsystem

Strangely, "having a working system" is mostly the argument why people
run Ubuntu over Debian Unstable.  "Horses for courses".

	-Paul