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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @04:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @04:28PM (#464129)

    None of those run in the kernel, ergo not Linux fragmentation...

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 07 2017, @09:12PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 07 2017, @09:12PM (#464287) Homepage Journal

    Soon now, we will have to talk of GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, Wayland/Linux, Mir/Linux, Gnome/Linux, KDE/Linux, Unity/Linux, and they'll all be incompatible.

    Not to mention Unity, the commercial game development platform, which is also available in a Linux flavour.

    -- hendrik