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Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

But it applies to the foundation Unity is built upon, as well:

    GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib
    doesn’t even have that. I think evolution is in a 
    similar situation (a complete email client).

Also, competition is always good.

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Note that Unity 2D is based on Qt and also works pretty well these days. It seems that they have spread the risks somewhat.

I do thing the general developments in the ecosystem are somewhat worrying. Nokia's involvement in Qt is becoming more clouded, and everyone is distracted by tablets and smartphones (and naturally, the money streams go into those directions).

That said, that's also an opportunity for more consolidation, so if Canonical play their cards right, the open source desktop may become more single minded and effective.

Unity 2D is deprecated: http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u...

"Since Unity 2D was depreciated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D"

http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u...

"Continued progress removing Qt and replacing with Nux"

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5O... "Unity 2D To Go Away In Ubuntu 12.10"

When Unity 2D will not be available, does it mean that Ubuntu will NOT run as a VirtualBox guest? I recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 in VirtualBox - mostly for development. I start to like Unity. But Ubuntu 12.04 is much slower than 10.04, in terms of GUI and responsiveness.

So what are Ubuntu's plans for GUI performance?

I guess they will do the same as Gnome Shell and use LLVMpipe

Many thanks for this hint. I never heard about LLVMpipe before and looked up what it means. The article that I found about is here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...

What I find interesting in this article is the following:

"[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]"

"[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"

I'm confident that Canonical is on top of this.

Nahh, Evolution is not the default client anymore (sadly, i prefer it to thunderbird) and Unity is built on top of compiz, where gnome-shell uses mutter. :(

Compiz is not without problems either: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/

And Mozilla has left Thunderbird more or less. Lack of developer power seems to be a pattern within open source desktop projects.

Yes, knew about compiz, that's why it's a shame that Canonical chose this direction instead of putting more developer efforts into the gnome stuff.

I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them.

(Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introduced into plugins since Natty--window previews and wobbly windows, I'm looking at you.)

No. Mutter is not "yet-another-window-manager". It's an evolution of the Metacity code base (Mutter = Metacity + Clutter). So the Gnome developers basically continued using their window manager instead of hopping to yet-another-window-manager.

Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402

Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).

Although Compiz is very, very customizable and hasn't changed all that much in years, so one would think it would appeal to all the people who are screaming about losing customizability and having everything change underneath them.

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