First impressions of 11.04

[Pongo A. Pan]

On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 20:10 -0700, NoOp wrote:

> 11.04 (daily beta2 as of today) liveCD claims that it can't run Unity
> (not that I really want it to at this point, but that's another
> issue)... go figure.
> 
> IMO 11.04 is destined to be the 'Vista' of Ubuntu. Basically you can't
> run our 'new & improved' desktop unless you contribute to global
> waste/landfills & buy 'new & improved' hardware in the process. What a
> bunch of crap.

Sounds *exactly* like what my colleagues who had DecScope smart
terminals (half as big as a Volkswagen and they looked like one too)
said on the day the IT folks told us that the serial and opto-coupled
lines from the computer center were going away and that we'd all have to
start using that new-fangled thing "eathernet."  The DecScopes were in
the landfill very quickly, followed in short order by the Dec-10
mainframe they had connected to.  That's progress.

I think Unity is just another sign-post on the road to the death of the
desktop pc and laptops as we now know them.  I was in a Starbucks in San
Francisco recently and was amazed at the difference from a year or two
ago: many fewer people with laptops; maybe even a majority with tablets.
(The continuing recession has meant that many people use Starbucks and
places like it as their offices). That's not quite true here in the
hinterlands, but I noticed yesterday while waiting for the rubber on my
car to be changed that there were two laptops and two iPads in the
waiting area and (mercifully) the sound was turned way down on the TV.
I waited an hour and a half and got useful work done with my iPad, nasty
touch interface, virtual keyboard and all.  Unity will adapt to touch
and tablets easily: that's where we're going.

I'll bet that in five years time only people doing CAD-CAM or very heavy
text entry will be using anything like conventional workstations; data
will largely be in the cloud, conventional hard disks will be largely a
bad memory, and everyone will have hyper-sized and hyper-strong thumbs,
or we'll be dictating lots of things, or maybe even just *thinking* them
or gesticulating at the tablet.  The old keyboard, mouse, CPU, and
monitor paradigm (however it is packaged) is going to be dead for most
people, or just an add-on to the TV.

There are lots of Ubuntu derivatives which will stay with conventional
Gnome even when Ubuntu abandons it next Fall.  The Mint guys are pretty
conservative and will likely offer a very vanilla option if you like
green vanilla.  But only for a while!  Commercial radio got started
about 1920 and ruled for about 20 years, until TV nearly destroyed it in
the early 1950s.  The desktop pc started around 1980 and ruled for more
than 30 years; not bad.  That's the way things are.



-- 
pongo pan
Aurelius up 2 days, 14:41, 2 users, load average: 0.72, 0.54, 0.66
Linux 2.6.35-25-generic
Linux Mint 10 Julia, Gnome 2.32.0