The Post Penguicon Unity Unification Story

Shawn Powers — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

This past weekend, I was a "Nifty Guest" at Penguicon. Being a nifty guest is both an honor and a curse. On one hand, you get that fancy "NIFTY" on your name badge, but on the other hand you need to dance like a monkey whenever asked. Thankfully my dancing was held to a minimum this year.

I did a session on backing up, which I'll be posting as a video presentation here on our website later this week. I also got to have a battle to the death with Jorge Castro from Canonical about Ubuntu's new Unity interface.

I've known Jorge for a couple years, but I was surprised to learn that he was heavily involved in the transition to Unity. It made my disdain for the new interface a little awkward, but at the same time, who better to address my concerns?

I still don't really care for Unity, but I'll admit the panel was very helpful in my attempt to deal with it. Here are some highlights. Please note the questions and responses are based on my recollection of the panel, so I've taken some liberties. These should not be taken as quotes:

Shawn: I'm of the opinion that if something ain't broke, don't fix it. What was so inherently wrong with Ubuntu that a complete rewrite was required?

Jorge: While there were certainly some things wrong with Ubuntu, it wasn't because of some horrible failing that we decided to transition to Unity. As we've matured both as a company and a distribution, we have hired design and desktop experience people. We felt we'd be able to bring a new interface to users based on design-centric concepts and user testing feedback.

Unity has been designed from the ground up with accessibility, multitouch, and hardware acceleration in mind, which is great for OEM relationships. If our goal is to get more systems pre-installed with Linux, Unity will be a big step in that direction.

S: While there are plenty of things I don't like about Unity, there were also things I didn't like about the traditional Ubuntu desktop. The difference is that with the old desktop, I could tweak it to be something I liked. With Unity, we're forced to compute the "Ubuntu Way" with very little if any customization available.

J: Yeah, I wish we would have included at least a few simple customization options for Unity. Unfortunately, they just weren't quite ready and bug tested for release. The good news is there are some customizations that can be done, and in the future we'll see more and more things to change and customize. [NOTE: I'll have a link to those customization options at the end]

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The Post Penguicon Unity Unification Story