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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 07 2017, @09:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the window-systems-need-window-shades dept.

What is Unity 8 and why's it a big deal?

Unity as a name and project began life in 2010 as a new UI for desktops and laptops and it arrived swiftly – in the following year. However, the idea morphed to offer the same screen and user experience on all devices regardless of mouse or touch. Put Ubuntu running Unity 8 on a phone and it'll render as a phone, put it on a PC and it'll render as a PC, put it on a tablet and it'll render as a tablet. That's the idea anyway, and it was analogous to ideas floating around Redmond for a single version of Windows running on PCs, phones and tablets – the same UI and same "experience". One brand, development and runtime.

That was part of the idea of Windows 8 anyway, and the Metro UI.

Coming with Unity 8 is Mir, the planned display server replacement to the predominant X Windows[sic] System, which Canonical announced in March 2013.

X Windows[sic] System is an industry standard for bitmap displays in Unix-like systems such as Ubuntu and is the product of Stanford University, MIT and IBM. Canonical wants to build its own display server, however.

Four years on, though, the dream remains unrealised with Mir like Unity 8 available only as a preview.

Unity 8 is, by the reckoning of Ubuntu daddy Mark Shuttleworth, a year late.

Windows 8 was an amazing innovation and totally worth replicating?


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  • (Score: 1) by Lester on Tuesday February 07 2017, @12:41PM

    by Lester (6231) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @12:41PM (#463995) Journal

    Wayland programs will only run on Wayland, not on X11 or Mir

    Are you sure? I think it will mostly affect libraries that call directly X11. For instance, it would affect the backend of QT and GTK.
    Think of it: QT and GTK don't have many troubles working in Windows.

    I suspect running Mir or Wayland programs on X11 (especially remotely, from machines with only X11 installed) will not be possible.

    Well, Wayland is not very "remote friendly". But in fact, X11 is not either, in theory it is, but not in fact. First, connection latency may make things difficult for fast events, but the main problem is that current libraries and programs have been designed with the unspoken assumption that you are running the Xserver in the same machine, making design decisions that wouldn't had made if they thought it was going to run remotely. Running a Gnome or a KDE remotely is... not a great experience.