Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Neil Jagdish Patel]

Hi,

On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 11:13 +0300, Timo Jyrinki wrote:
> 2011/4/8 Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com>:
> > I couldn't have believed it even two months ago still, but today I
> > feel the same. When I switch back to classic GNOME it feels inferior
> > now; I'm particularly missing the super-fast keyboard
> > shortcuts/search/navigation and bigger screen real estate.
> 
> I have started to like Unity a lot, at least on a though level and
> also seeing in practice that it's really improving. The biggest issues
> have been that unity has been crashing for me all the time. Today is
> actually the first day that unity/compiz didn't crash within a minute
> of logging in when alt-tabbing or something similar (then it usually
> took longer time before it crashed the next time). Fingers crossed
> that unity 3.8.4 is now actually more stable in real use - same was
> said about 3.8.2. If it stays for a day of work without crashing,
> that's a really good accomplishment compared to before.

3.8.4 should be much, much more stable, especially if you're on a 64-bit
system. The entire team is concentrated on crashers and I think we'll
have a very stable Unity by hard-freeze.

> Besides fixing crashers I really would see need for more accessibility
> support and help. I don't know how to access eg. indicators or system
> menu from keyboard, which is quite essential for me even without
> disabilities, but for people with disabilities I believe the
> accessibility in general is relatively poor at the moment. gnome-shell
> already has a lot of a11y stuff integrated in 3.0 (considering it's
> the first stable release), and Ubuntu with accessibility as one of the
> core Ubuntu philosophy items should have as well. Of course, by 12.04
> LTS at least.

Both the panel and the launcher have a11y support but we really wanted
to achieve more in this area this cycle but fell a bit short with the
Dash. We do have keyboard shortcuts to access the different components:

F10 - Opens first available menu in Panel and then left/right arrows let
you move between all the menus on the panel
Alt+F1 - Focuses the launcher and allows you to keyboard-navigate the
icons and also navigate the Quicklists.
Super - Opens the Dash

> For 11.10, probably something should be done about the logging in
> time, with is terrible at least with a traditional spinning, encrypted
> disk, compared to normal Gnome. Weirdly sometimes I saw a pretty fast
> logging in even after reboot, but normally it's 30s+ from gdm to
> desktop. Something is seriously churning the hard disk with seeks,
> possibly something that only occurs with specific conditions.

I'll be looking into this, I believe it's because we needlessly
initialise the place-daemons during log-in.

Regards,

-- 
Neil Jagdish Patel | Technical Lead
Desktop Experience Team
Canonical
27 Floor, Millbank Tower
London SW1P 4QP
Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings
www.canonical.com