Unity ROCKS!!!

[Liam Proven]

On 2 May 2011 10:22, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Am Sonntag, den 01.05.2011, 20:57 -0500 schrieb Albert Wagner:
>> > My point is that apparently the developers did, in fact, keep their
>> > promise, because Ubuntu 11.04 is up and running without a hitch on my old
>> > boat anchor, albeit without Unity.
>> >
>> Yes, that true.  But, the word is that that is temporary.  Supposedly,
>> plans are to discontinue the Gnome versions altogether.
> i think the point of this branch of the thread was that future versions
> of ubuntu wont support slow/old hardware ...
>
> ubuntu wont drop gnome, unity depends on many apps from it and was
> implemented as a frontend to gnome ...
>
> what will likely be dropped is the classic gnome desktop in favor of
> unity-2d for hardware that has no 3D acceleration ...
>
> did you try unity-2d on old or slow hardware yet so that you can claim
> there was a broken promise ?

Yes. Exactly. This!

For now, the full Unity experience needs a 3D card. So, in case you
don't have one, there is the Classic GNOME desktop as a fallback
option.

But to support people who don't have a 3D card, Canonical is
developing Unity-2D. It's here, now, and it works - I am running it on
my 2004 IBM Thinkpad X31. It's pretty, very space-efficient and
functional enough to be usable. It does not yet implement all the
functionality I would like, but it's close enough for jazz.

Unity-2D is written using Nokia's Qt programming toolkit. (Qt used to
be from Trolltech; Nokia acquired them, but now that Nokia is moving
to Windows Phone 7, it is going to spin out the Qt division as a
separate company again.) Thus, Unity-2D is the reason that Ubuntu
11.04 now includes Qt as a standard component. FWIW, Qt is also the
toolkit that KDE uses.

When Unity-2D is finished, *it* will be the fallback option for those
without 3D cards and classic GNOME will disappear.

But then, classic GNOME is going to disappear from *all* distros,
because Classic GNOME is GNOME 2 and now the GNOME Project has moved
on to GNOME 3.

So, yes, if you have older, low-spec hardware, you /are/ still
supported, you /can/ run Unity and you're not excluded. Just install
Unity-2D. You can still switch to and from Classic GNOME once it's
installed.

But the option will disappear in the next release of Ubuntu.

More generally: people, just relax: it's just a desktop! It's still
your computer, your apps, your setup, your data. There's no Digital
Restrictions Management, no copy protection or anything and it's all
still free! Same apps, same desktop wallpaper, same file manager and
admin tools and so on. All that's gone away are 2 small strips of
screen at top and bottom and the controls on them. It's not that big a
difference.

People are making a mountain out of a molehill over this. A different
desktop is not such a big deal.

If you don't like it, for now, you don't have to use it. In the next
release, you will, or you can go use Linux Mint 12 or Debian or
something. Fedora and SUSE are going with GNOME 3, so you probably
won't like them - that's a bigger change than Unity.

But GNOME 2 is history. It was going away /anyway,/ whatever Canonical
did. So don't blame Canonical - they gave you an alternative to GNOME
3 which is /more like your existing system/.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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