First Impressions of the New Unity Netbook Interface

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical unveiled the new Ayatana work that has been happening. Unity is a new interface for Ubuntu Netbook Edition which targets the instant-on market. Other instant-on players include Phoenix Hyperspace, ASUS Express Gate (Splashtop), and Xandros Presto. Linux basically owns the space with OEMs. These OSes are stripped down to almost nothing and typically don't access the filesystem at all, instead running stateless. Expect ChromeOS to compete strongly in this market when it's released later this year.

Ubuntu will be following the normal market trend of releasing custom-built images for OEM hardware, working with the manufacturers to get the boot time as low as possible. Shuttleworth is claiming that Unity will have a 7 second boot time using SSD.

What does Unity look like on my netbook? Take a look.

Compare this to Hyperspace:

And to Express Gate / Splashtop

Unity give more of a functional look to the genre, departing from the other's spartanism, which I think will give customers a feel of more control and greater ability.

As far as I can tell, it is not possible to modify the left launcher directly. I tried to add Chrome (my preferred browser), but couldn.t do it until I already had Chrome launched and the icon appeared in the launcher, allowing me to right-click and pin the application to the panel. You can use the top folder icon to gain access to installed applications not on the launcher panel. If that icon choice seems unintuitive to you, know that you are not alone in thinking that.

The interface is clean and easy to use. Within two minutes, I had discovered everything I needed to know to get to work. The panel iicons have an arrow on the left side when they are running, and the active application is identified by an arrow on the right. If you have more than one window of a given application open, right clicking will give you a scaled view of all the application's windows.

My one complaint about the interface is that it is quite easy to get notification windows which bleed off the bottom of the screen., but that shouldn't be a problem for most people using the interface as designed. Unity is already 90% there, and you can expect that Maverick (to be released 10/10/10 -- is he a numerologist?) will operate amazingly well with this interface.

Democratic, Meritocratic, or Dictatorship?

Image via Wikipedia

Webupd8 has an article about Mark Shuttleworth's comment on the left-side button decision which quotes from the bug report:

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get second-guessed all the time. 

It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this.

> If you want to tell us
> that we are all part of it, we want information, and we want our opinion
> to be decisive.
>

No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.

Mark

 Martin Owens makes a comment that Ubuntu is not really a meritocracy. Is that true? Is Ubuntu really democratic? Really meritocratic? Actually a dictatorship (as Mark Shuttleworth's "SABDFL" title implies)? Does it matter? Which is better for Ubuntu in the long run.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with being a dictatorship, as long as the leader is good. The Linux kernel is a reasonable example. OS X might be, too, depending on your stance on Free Software.

Shortly after it was introduced, Ubuntu leapt past other, more entrenched distros primarily because of its ability to build a large, active community. The Ubuntu Forums were almost immediately filled with people giving their time to help. Ubuntu Brainstorm came about to help identify problem areas in the distro. Ubuntu's active community is almost certainly the largest of any distro.

The activity of the community leads to the impression that Ubuntu is a community-driven project. It's not, really. Mark seems to imply in his comment that the best and brightest who further go on to prove themselves are given a kind of voting privilege or influence on the decision to be made.

From the outside, it appears to be more of a dictatorship, with advisors being appointed by merit. I'm okay with that, actually. In fact, I think more direction would be good for the project. This is FLOSS: people who don't like that model (or the direction) can change projects or fork. (I'm serious, not trolling.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Martin Owens: Not Meritocratic Yet (doctormo.org)
• Canonical's new COO gets religion on Linux desktop (arstechnica.com)
• Mark Shuttleworth responds to the window button issue; hints at good things to come (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Shuttleworth Steps Down As Canonical CEO

"In a surprise move (at least, it was surprising to me), Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has announced he's stepping down as the CEO of Canonical, the commercial endeavour behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. He will continue, however, to play major role in the company and Ubuntu's future.

Jane Silber, the Chief Operating Officer of Canonical, will take over Shuttleworth's role as CEO. His stepping down as CEO does not mean, in any way, that Shuttleworth will disappear from the stage. In fact, his stepping down allows him to focus more on product design and development, his passions. He will also remain as the head of the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board, and he wants to spend more time working with partners, especially in Asia."

...

"'This move will bring about is a clearer separation of the role of CEO of Canonical and the leader of the Ubuntu community,' Silber said, 'It will be two different people now, which I think will be helpful in both achieving their joint and individual goals more quickly.'"

See OSNews for full report. Also reported on Compuworld.