Unity on the Desktop

Mark's keynote at UDS spoke about one of the biggest changes to happen in Ubuntu since it's inception: Unity as the default desktop. As the technical lead for the project, I wanted to explain some of the technical changes that will occur this cycle to put us in the best position for Natty:

Graphics Support

Firstly, it's good to mention that it's actually "Unity as the default desktop if your graphics card and drivers support it". We've learnt a harsh lesson this cycle about where Unity works well, where it should work but doesn't and finally where we just can't expect it to work.

Therefore, it is going to be a primary focus this cycle to enable Unity on as many chipsets as possible. We will be much more lenient about what OpenGL features are required (allowing runtime fallbacks through detection and through quirks files for those chipsets that lie about their capabilities).

That means that we'll make a best attempt at running, trying to gracefully degrade through features, but at least getting to you a panel, launcher and places.

So what happens when we detect that we just can't run? We hope to automatically fallback to GNOME Desktop, which will give the best experience at that point.

Performance and Compiz

This is a huge issue on the current Unity implementation. Yes, if you have good hardware it'll work fine, but it's unacceptable for it not to be performant on, for instance, Intel i945 based systems. There are a few reasons for the current performance issues, and after much thinking and testing, we have decided to move Unity's view implementation from Mutter to Compiz 0.9.

For what Unity needs to do, Compiz will give us a huge benefit in terms of performance and power usage, as well as allowing us to get closer to the graphics hardware and easily implement the graceful fallbacks of GL capabilities that I mentioned above.

It also means we can build on the great work of the Compiz team's upstream work and their excellent window management plugins to provide a more complete desktop experience, faster.

We're finalising some technical bits and pieces with regards to the switch and we're aiming to get it into archive ASAP. I'll be sure to post here as soon as we've done that.

Stability and Quality

Stability is the final technical issue to solve for the desktop. We have come leaps and bounds from the early Maverick cycle (currently most of the crashes are graphics issues, trying to do things the drivers don't support). We want to continue this and we will be pushing more things out of the Unity process and into D-Bus based services that can crash at their pleasure (but hopefully they won't :), and Unity can just restart the services instead of crashing itself.

Unity was always architected like this, but we've found ways to get the last bits of logic out of process and so you should see a rock-solid Unity on your desktop this cycle.

Quality is of upmost importance and is the focus for this cycle, over features or anything else. The community did an excellent job last cycle for Unity and we hope to repay the favour by fixing as many bugs as possible and assuring that Unity oozes quality.

Finally, for those thinking that we are starting from scratch due to the move to Compiz, I can assure you that we aren't and honestly, we couldn't. Unity is architected to separate the views from the models and controllers, and we are using that to enable us to quickly port our views to Compiz while keeping and bug fixing the models and controllers.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix Karmic

As Karmic hit beta freeze this week, and the artwork began to freeze, I thought it would be a good time to introduce the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR):


As you can probably tell, the largest change from the previous version is a new design and layout. This is thanks to the awesome work of the design team. In addition to the new UI, there has been a fair amount of work in the architecture of the various UNR components. Apart from the users ( :) ), the largest beneficiaries of this are the launcher and window-picker-applet.

The launcher has been updated to use the latest version of Clutter, and benefits from the performance improvements that the Clutter 1.0 release carries. In addition to that, the launcher now has a framework for plugins, which allow extending the home screen and adding new categories on the left (and example is the Files & Folders category). There's not too much documentation at the moment, but I'll follow this post up in the coming weeks with some examples.

Window Picker Applet has had a major overhaul thanks to Jason Smith of Docky fame. In addition to making the code more sane, he's transformed the look and feel of the applet and fixed a bunch of annoying bugs. Coupled with the new Gtk and icon theme (Dust and Humanity), Jason's work makes the panel look much, much nicer than before:

In addition to these bits, there are a couple of things I'd like to highlight:

UNR Karmic contains both the excellent Messaging and Session Indicators. The message indicator allows you to quickly see how many unread emails/IM messages/Twitter replies you have. The session indicator allows you to easily set your IM presence and also lets you switch users (if you hardware supports it) and log out easily.



We've also got the very latest Notify OSD and the Ubuntu Software Store, for a nice and easy way to expand your netbook's usefulness :).



That's it for now, you can grab the latest UNR image from the daily builds here, and I've posted links to a few more screenshots below.

Android applications on UNR Jaunty - Part Deux

Mike uploaded a video of Android applications running natively on Jaunty UNR:



(didn't realize pgo cuts videos, click here to see it)

The applications are very responsive thanks to the accelerated Android drawing engine (and that means they aren't a burden on the CPU either).

The video shows the Android browser working like normal, which points to the next challenge in getting everything working great: piping the services and the filesystem on the host computer through to the Android runtime so apps can take advantage (and be more useful :).

If you have any questions or just want to bug Mike about getting his packaging finished, you can leave a comment on his blog post.

Update: Added link to video