Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, April 14, 2011 09:13:39 AM Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> John Johansen wrote on 11/04/11 01:00:
> > On 04/09/2011 12:21 AM, Allison Randal wrote:
> >> On 04/07/2011 11:52 PM, Martin Pitt wrote:
> >>> If this is a major issue, then frankly I'd rather just remove the
> >>> whitelist and allow all old-style systray applications than dropping
> >>> Unity by default completely.
> 
> We've already done that. Now we're moving to the next step.
> 
> >> Yup, holding the vision for the future while addressing practical
> >> concerns doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, black-or-white.
> 
> It's not all or nothing -- it's been a very gradual change.
> 
> In April 2010, we announced that we would be retiring the notification
> area in Ubuntu 11.04.
> 
> In 10.04 and 10.10, Ubuntu allowed both notification area items and
> application indicator items.
> 
> In 11.04, Unity reimplemented the notification area with a whitelist, a
> whitelist that is longer than we originally intended.
> 
> In 11.10, if people have time to work on fixes for HPLIP and Mumble,
> we'll be able to shrink the whitelist. (And by then we'll have a real
> developer site, where ISVs can more easily find information about
> application indicators and other Ubuntu APIs.)
> 
> > +1 its enough of a problem that some family members won't be making
> > the switch to unity.
> 
> Can you be specific? Have you reported bugs on the applications?

Unless it's a package developed specifically for Ubuntu, it's really not a bug 
in the package from an upstream perspective.  Some upstreams will choose to 
support Ubuntu specific requirements and others won't.  For those that don't, 
either users will lose out on functionality or we'll have to develop and 
maintain Ubuntu specific patches.  

I doubt it's supportable to deal with Ubuntu patches for all the relevant 
Universe packages.  We also know there are some important applicaitons that 
can't/won't support the migration, so it's either live with a legacy 
notification area or not support these packages.  I suspect that, in the 
interest of giving the users fully functional applications we'll come down on 
the side of supporting the notification area for these packages.  It makes 
sense to me, given that, just to plan on supporting it generally for 
applications that use it.

Scott K