Unity (user interface)

Unity is developed by Canonical working environment for PCs and netbooks, which should deal particularly economical with screen space. Unlike Gnome, KDE SC 4 or Xfce Unity is not a collection of programs and should be used primarily with existing GTK programs.

Unity will be released as free software under the terms of the third versions of the GNU General Public License ( GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License ( LGPL).

History

Until published in October 2010 Version 10:10 Ubuntu Gnome 2 used as a standard surface in the version for desktop PCs. As the GNOME project offers no special surface for netbooks with their small screens and the already developed for the same reason Netbook interface of Moblin / MeeGo was not deemed suitable, Canonical has developed its own interface for this device type. This first appeared with Ubuntu 10.10.

Since Ubuntu 11:04 Unity is used as a standard surface. Since Unity has been used since that time as the standard version of Ubuntu, there is no netbook version more. With Version 11:10 Gnome 2 was removed and used as an alternative for less powerful PCs a 2D version of Unity.

The Gnome project and Canonical had in the past differences for alignment. So Canonical fit, for example, to a system developed by KDE new protocol for controlling notification fields to Gnome 2, but due to lack of compatibility with Gnome 3 and - was rejected by the Gnome project a lack of willingness to communicate the Canonical developers - according to Gnome. According to Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth the Gnome project also reject the familiar Mac OS global menu bar.

As a result of these differences Canonical was forced not to bring the new interface of Gnome 3 on Ubuntu for desktop PCs to use and offer the old Gnome 2 surface only as a fallback option in the event of an incompatibility with the installed graphics hardware.

Criticism

The decision was taken Canonical's controversial. The employees of Canonical Compiz developer Sam Spilsbury, for example, they welcomed. Others criticized for various reasons, eg because the required computing power is high. Canonical's requirement that volunteers must assign their own copyright to cooperate in Canonical projects to enable proprietary Relizenzieren, is also criticized.

Desktop version

The work on the desktop version of Unity has begun on the Ubuntu Developer Summit in 2010, under which the change was announced.

Ayatana project

Unity is part of the Ayatana project, an initiative to improve the so-called user experience within Ubuntu. In addition to Unity, the projects MeMenu, the notification system NotifyOSD and Application Indicators are here gathered under example. Outside of Ubuntu Ayatana got so far also from the openSUSE project support.

Technical Basics

The Unity version that comes with Ubuntu 10.10 is written in the programming language Vala and uses the native Intel program library Clutter for the surface. Since Ubuntu Unity based on Compiz 11:04 however. This version replaces much of the Vala code by C and uses a toolkit called Nux instead of clutter. Unity requires a compatible 3D accelerator.

In addition, parts of the frameworks of Gnome and various freelance projects as a back -end, such as Zeitgeist, used.

In addition, Canonical has developed a "2D ​​" version based on Qt and QML, which was released on January 14, 2011 in a development version. For this version, no 3D acceleration is necessary. Unity 2D works with Metacity. Meanwhile, the 2D version was rejected in favor of the classic 3D version after the main programmer of Unity 2D Canonical had left and also the primarily developed by Red Hat for GNOME Shell software renderer LLVMpipe is sufficiently fast enough for the presentation of work surfaces.

Since Unity is currently exclusively developed by Linux distributor Canonical, Linux is currently only officially supported. Versions for other Unix -like operating systems are not currently available.

Privacy Policy

Since the version of Ubuntu 12:10 in conjunction with Unity problems related to privacy have become known. These relate to the use of the ' Dash' function.