2D Unity Not on the Natty Plan Says Canonical
“It's not on the Natty plan for now, but we'll be evaluating the progresses and will consider adding a 3rd session option if the development goes as planned,” said David Barth, Desktop Experience Team, Engineering Manager at Canonical.
Unity 2D developer and Canonical OEM team lead, Bill Filler, created a lot of buzz around the 2D Unity option last week when he published a post entitled Unity 2D. Filler’s original post was unavailable for several days and subsequent is now available again to the public and the screenshots included are from that post.
The removal of the Filler’s blog post prompted Linux Pro Magazine Online (LPMO) to contact David Barth, Engineering Manager for Desktop Experience (DX) Team, at Canonical, to find out the more about the future of the 2D Unity option in the Natty release.
Barth clarified that Filler is the developer and the DX Team participates in the development of the project by sharing foundational elements such as bamf, dee, places and more.
LPMO asks Barth, “Will there be a 2D Unity Option available for Ubuntu 11.04?" “It's not on the Natty plan for now, but we'll be evaluating the progresses and will consider adding a 3rd session option if the development goes as planned,” said Barth an exclusive interview with LPMO. “For Natty, the plan is still to have Unity 3D and the Gnome classic session as a 2D fallback,” continued Barth. “The classic Gnome desktop will be kept as the safe and recommended default, even if a 3rd session is added. This is important for a lot of our users, in the community or in enterprises,” he added.
Barth said that people who don't have the kind of 3D support Unity requires because either they have old cards, or brand new ones that have issues with drivers as well as ARM systems without 3D drivers were the target audiences the DX team at Canonical had in mind when it starting the project.
“2D Unity, will not require require proprietary graphics card drivers, it will require regular 2D acceleration support; however, in an unaccelerated, plain framebuffer it doesn't work that well,” says Barth.
Barth wanted users to know a little more about the 2D Unity option. “Unity-qt is exemplar in 2 ways. First, it brings some more reality to the notion of Gnome Platform,” he noted.
“It reinforces how we've constructed Unity so far, ie by preserving the investments that have been made in the Gnome libraries and infrastructure. And by adding some additional "Ayatana" sauce (which we now call "Unity Foundations") to provide the overall foundations for the Unity Desktop Shell. Unity-QT, despite using the QT toolkit, reuses all of the underlying libraries that the regular Unity Shell is using," Barth said.
Barth first realized Gnome could be a "platform supporting different toolkits or shells" at Guadec in 2009, as Vincent Untz was introducing a QT presentation. According to Barth, “Vincent was seeing QT as an alternative toolkit running on top of the rest of the Gnome Platform." Barth said Untz's introduction was more in the context of Gnome Mobile; however he adds, “It now sounds really premonitory.”
Barth also wanted to further that platform idea, “I wanted to underline the importance of QML in Unity-QT.” Barth says, “QML really made a difference in how fast the Unity-QT implementation could be developed and to their credit, the unity-qt developers are very sharp as well!” Barth added, “This example shows how a toolkit can "reinvent" itself with some contemporary web technologies.”
For user who want to know more about 2D Unity the code and PPA is publicly available.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusIssue 262/2022
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Kali Linux 2022.3 Released
From the creators of the most popular penetration testing distributions on the planet, comes a new release with some new tools and a community, real-time chat option.
-
The 14" Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop is Shipping
After a considerable delay, the 14" version of the Pinebook Pro laptop is, once again, available for purchase.
-
OpenMandriva Lx ROME Technical Preview Released
OpenMandriva’s rolling release distribution technical preview has been released for testing purposes and adds some of the latest/greatest software into the mix.
-
Linux Mint 21 is Now Available
The latest iteration of Linux Mint, codenamed Vanessa, has been released with a new upgrade tool and other fantastic features.
-
Firefox Adds Long-Anticipated Feature
Firefox 103 has arrived and it now includes a feature users have long awaited…sort of.
-
System76 Refreshes Their Popular Oryx Pro Laptop with a New CPU
The System76 Oryx Pro laptop has been relaunched with a 12th Gen CPU and more powerful graphics options.
-
Elive Has Released a New Beta
The Elive team is proud to announce the latest beta version (3.8.30) of its Enlightenment-centric Linux distribution.
-
Rocky Linux 9 Has Arrived
The latest iteration of Rocky Linux is now available and includes a host of new features and support for new architecture.
-
Slimbook Executive Linux Ultrabook Upgrading Their CPUs
The Spanish-based company, Slimbook, has made available their next generation Slimbook Executive Linux ultrabooks with a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU.
-
Fedora Linux is Coming to the Raspberry Pi 4
Thanks to significant work in the upstream, the upcoming release of Fedora 37 will introduce support for the Raspberry Pi 4.
Dock on the left
Unity? No Thanks
I also don't like the unified menus. No all the apps I use work with the new scheme. The result, more screen taken up. In the future, if all gnome and kde apps play along with Ubuntu's unified menu, I might reconsider.