Unity: a lightweight netbook interface for Ubuntu

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/383

by audidude • 16 years ago

92 56 16 years ago

markshuttleworth.com

audidude2• 16 years ago

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/canonical-dx-team/une/ubuntu lucid main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/canonical-dx-team/une/ubuntu lucid main

apt-get install unity

unity --show

mhansen• 16 years ago

To get the key:

  sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AA2BB78B7AE26941

mrkschan• 16 years ago

don't forget the key @ https://launchpad.net/~canonical-dx-team/+archive/une

nuclear_eclipse2• 16 years ago

`add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une` will add both the apt sources and the signing key in a single command.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

I love it - it's about damned time that the open source community started giving a real shit about UI.

weego• 16 years ago

I think they always have done at a certain level, but of course good developers do not make good "joe average" users, and the open source movement has really always been about programmers, not graphic designers/UX/IA people. That's always where companies have added the real value when they build off open source imo. While I admire what people like KDE and Gnome do in terms of effort, the results they return have always been questionable.

jteo• 16 years ago

UI development is not a democratic process.

drats• 16 years ago

http://www.canonical.com/products/unity

If it's all about speed and lightness they might want to drop firefox for chrome. The difference is very noticeable on an Atom 1.6gighz, and in the upcoming ARM powered devices it will be too.

robryan• 16 years ago

Does it have anything to do with betting on the browser they can probably influence more in the future rather than one they essentially have no control of?

pavs• 16 years ago

I am not sure what you mean. How do they have more control on Firefox and not Chromium? Both are open source, both can be forked and customized in to whatever they want it to be. One is exceptionally faster than the other. Since they are concentrating on speed, shouldn't Chrome/Chromium be the obvious choice?

borism2• 16 years ago

will Chrome support ARM? It doesn't support PowerPC...

wmf• 16 years ago

Yes, Google is working on ARM support. I don't see people dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows on ARM, though.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

The screenshot ( http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/L... ) does use Chromium. What I find remarkable about this "light" version of Ubuntu, though, is that it seems to use up more screen real estate for panels than normal Ubuntu! What the hell?

Legion2• 16 years ago

The left panel has "this should auto-hide" written all over it.

As a Ubuntu Netbook Remix user, though, I'm looking at the window titlebar and wondering, what happened to the titlebar-integrates-into-top-panel stuff from UNR? Shouldn't that remain a part of the "conserving precious vertical display space" approach?

lh• 16 years ago

Looking at that Ubuntu Light example image, they could still move the window title and buttons to bar at the top, next to the search field, to save more vertical space. In the other hand, if they want to make it more usable for touch users, they'll need to enlarge the main toolbar and all those tiny indicators (battery, volume etc.) at the lost of some vertical space.

emilis_info• 16 years ago

Yes, the top of that screenshot looks messy. If they are moving in this direction, they could also get rid of the top panel. Or at least redesign it.

I have been working in a similar desktop on my wide-screen laptop for nearly a year now. I feel much more productive. It took me some time and skills to configure it, but the tools are already available. I use Openbox+Tint2+Conky and some other lightweight utilities. Also Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890 Since they are talking about getting users to the browser faster, they may as well tweak the browser to work better in this environment.

It is more natural when window/tab hierarchy flows from left to right, than from left and then from top.

ivenkys• 16 years ago

"It’s about how fast you have a running system that is responsive to the needs of the user." - This is the key.

Make it look nice with excellent fonts and i am sold. I know this is not designed for a workstation - but for standard browsing, checking emails and general usage , this could be it.

corruption2• 16 years ago

I love it, however there are still a few things off.

1) The gradient on the window titlebar is too pronounced and isn't consistent with the left sidebar.

2) Fonts don't look awesome - they are okay though. Please just license or create a truly great font!

3) Icons on the sidebar don't look right. I'd rather no background personally.

audidude2• 16 years ago

fonts get insanely better for my systems the moment i turn on full hinting.

corruption2• 16 years ago

Agreed (I use ubuntu too), but normal users won't do this. Surely there must be a good solution by default?

ZeroGravitas9• 16 years ago

To get the fonts I like (Mac OS X style) I turn hinting off completely. Ubuntu seems to be moving closer to this as the default as time goes by, probably a smart move as there will be less and less people used to old-skool Windows font rendering.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Does anybody that has used both have an idea of how this compares to the Ubuntu Notebook Remix default UI?

I've been using it on a small acer netbook with a 3G card in it and it has worked pretty well in that configuration for me, I'm curious how they compare but I'm loathe to install stuff on it without some idea of what I'm getting in to because it is a machine I rely on in emergencies (on the road, server down).

AngryParsley• 16 years ago

Dock on the left, title bar and sys tray at the top, window controls on the left side... this vaguely reminds me of some other OS, and I don't think that's at all a bad thing. People like OS X's UI. It makes sense to go with what works.

If they wanted to save more vertical screen real estate, Ubuntu could take another hint from Apple and enable Global Menu Bar by default ( http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ )

dchest• 16 years ago

They are doing this. "Third, we will make the top panel smarter. We’ve already talked about adopting a single global menu, which would be rendered by the panel in this case."

Avshalom• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure they are actually, I am very sure there was a canonical blog post recently saying the netbook distro was going to use a global menu.

ZeroGravitas9• 16 years ago

My OS X dock was always on the left, but the default positon was at the bottom. Later design changes actually re-inforced this decision as I believe the 3-D effect didn't work vertically.

riobard• 16 years ago

It's funny that they are talking about maximizing the vertical pixels while letting title bar, menu bar, url bar, bookmark bar, tab bar, horizontal scroll bar, and status bar eating up 1/3 of vertical pixels of the primary web browser window on the home page photo at <http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>.

Seriously, Open Source marketing should be improved in this level of detail. Yes netbooks have shallow screens, then why wasting 145 precious vertical pixels to show non-content controls on a web browser window only 428 pixels high?

Some naive ways to improve the impression:

* Make the browser window taller, preferably taking all available vertical space. Present more web content when you really want to improve the web experience. (Right now I can only see the big heading of NYT, not really interesting.)

* Bundle one of those Hide Menu plugin to kill menu bar. How often do you really need it? And when you do need it, just click one button on the url bar to summon it.

* Choose a page that is slightly narrower or widen the window a little bit (you have the horizontal pixels to waste!) so horizontal scroll does not show up.

* Hide the status bar. Most users don't look at it anyway.

* If there is only one tab, don't show the tab bar.

Or better yet, replacing Firefox with Chrome solves it once and for all.

drblast• 16 years ago

On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do cleanly.

We have wide screens now, and a lack of vertical space. The solution seems obvious to me; don't take up vertical space with desktop UI and move it to the side instead.

I love the gnome-shell, but I'd love it more if I could get those top pixels back. On a netbook, every little bit counts.

RyanMcGreal2• 16 years ago

>On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do cleanly.

I tried this with the past four versions of Ubuntu (8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04) on my Aspire One. In the first three cases I went back to a top or bottom panel because the side panel was ugly and unusable. With 10.04, a right-side panel is actually decent for the first time. It's not great - e.g. the shutdown applet is still too wide and doesn't flip vertically - but it's decent.

ZeroGravitas9• 16 years ago

Both Ubuntu and Firefox have stated that they're going to get rid of most of the vertical UI you mention.

http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/removing-firefoxs-st...

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333

I'm hopeful they've actually communicated about this in private with each other, but maybe that's hoping for too much.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

curious to hear thoughts on this vs chromeos

ash• 16 years ago

It's instructive to compare this with Windows 7 (often comes installed on modern netbooks). Recipe: 1. move default taskbar to the left and 2. use Chrome. The result is pretty good, I think:

http://drop.io/dyhgfkv/asset/windows7-png

tdoggette• 16 years ago

Now that I've acclimated to Chrome on Windows, I don't think I could give up having the tabs on the very top of the screen. Me and my man Fitts love having the browser tabs at the top and the open applications at the bottom. It's really fast to switch tabs using the mouse that way.

Legion2• 16 years ago

"Unity is available now for testing on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS" (http://www.canonical.com/products/unity)

Oh hell. Now I have to run out to my pickup and grab my netbook. There goes a productive morning.

Unity: a lightweight netbook interface for Ubuntu

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