Some questions about the switch to Unity in 11.04

[Cristopher Thomas]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 07:25, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Does running Unity really mean I will not be able to trade out my
> desktops? What happens if I don't like it and want to use XFCE instead?
> Someone said, because of the tight Mutter connection, I won't be able to.

Those better in the know may contradict me, but I'm pretty sure you
would still be able to switch to your preffered environment as normal.
 And as far as Mutter goes, it's apparently supposed to be being
replaced by Compiz.

> 2. What kind of performance hit can we reasonably expect? I'm running
> older hardware (1.6Ghz dual core AMD Sempron with 3GB memory). Will I
> need to abandon Ubuntu or will my hardware man up and make it?

The idea is that the environment should scale to what your hardware
can support.  If Unity absolutely won't fly, it's back to default
Gnome and dual-panels for you, from what I've read.

> 3. Is this a test run for Unity on the desktop or is this the final
> decision? Has Canonical decided GNOME is out?

Unity is a shell for Gnome.  Gnome is still there, and fully
supported.  That should mean that if you hate Unity, it will be
possible to switch to vanilla Gnome.

--
Cris