Ubuntu's risky leap: Unity on Wayland
- 05 November, 2010 16:37
- Comments 3
Future versions of Ubuntu will ship with the Unity interface
Today Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced on his blog that the Ubuntu distribution will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland a more modern alternative.
Read Shuttleworth’s blog here.
The news comes only days after Ubuntu announced it would change its default user interface from the GNOME environment to its own Unity, which is better suited to netbooks.
There are a number of possible side effects as a result of moving away from GNOME and X.
Despite all its posturing about how “Ubuntu is not dropping GNOME” and “GNOME is still available” the decision to move away from the mainstream GNOME desktop to its own Unity could be seen as a slap in the face to the rest of the GNOME community developers.
There’s now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.
By focusing on Unity (on Wayland or X) for Ubuntu, Canonical has essentially forked its own Linux distribution.
I understand Wayland is “compatible” with existing X apps, but the porting work involved may lead to bugs and other inconsistencies Ubuntu can do without.
Even if the mainline Ubuntu distribution offers users the choice of installing the GNOME desktop, it’s only a matter of time before a GNOME-only distribution emerges much like Kubuntu is for KDE.
This GNOME-only Ubuntu distribution could be spearheaded by Canonical or it could be community-driven.
My gut feeling for Canonical moving so aggressively in this direction is the rise of ultra-mobile computing.
Shuttleworth wants a piece of the netbook and tablet PC action and the standard PC interface (GNOME, KDE, Windows, etc) just won’t cut it.
Microsoft has tried to transplant its PC desktop experience onto small, more mobile devices with only mixed results.
The big winners in this race are the ones who dared to redesign the PC interface from the ground up. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are leading the revolution.
Why might I suggest this? Well if you examine Shuttleworth’s “reasons” for wanting to switch from X to Wayland it revolves around user-experience.
He speaks of “super-smooth graphics and effects” and considering the Android environment.
These are things that modern desktops are less likely to suffer from due to improvements in processing power and display technology. So the impetus lies with portable computing.
Moreover, Shuttleworth doesn’t really give compelling reasons to move away from X, only to say “it’s extremely hard” to get good graphics and effects with it.
Given the mobile phone I’m carrying runs X and its performance is indistinguishable from an iPhone or Android device there isn’t a lot weight behind Shuttleworth’s reasoning.
X might not be as responsive and scalable (down) as it could be, but that doesn’t mean it’s performance is so bad it needs to be turfed out.
I’ve even asked Linus Torvalds the million dollar question of whether Linux needs another type of display environment and he said something along the lines of “it would be silly to replace X”.
I also remember once during a presentation by Rasterman (Aussie open source graphics guru) he said the overhead of using X is not much to worry about either.
Another problem for Ubuntu will arise if Wayland can’t provide the feature set of X people will be forced to look elsewhere.
Ubuntu is definitely navigating uncharted waters here and it’s a one-two punch to its steady ascension to fame.
Sure Ubuntu is being innovative and it deserves credit for that, but I question whether it needed to radically change its desktop and interface for its mainstream distribution.
Just reading over Mark’s blog again I’m waiting for him to write something like “this alternative to the mainstream Ubuntu will be called …buntu”.
Instead he’s jumping over the frying pan and into the fire. He’s prepared to break something that only needed a minimal amount of fixing to be a credible alternative to today’s mainstream desktop operating systems – with the immeasurable advantage of being free – and start again.
I wish Ubuntu every success in its new quest to conquer mobile computers. But as far as the desktop goes it’s a very risky move that could alienate developers and users alike.
In years to come it might look back and wonder why it didn’t focus on making its good distribution even better instead of radically overhauling it.
Rodney Gedda is Editor of TechWorld Australia. Follow Rodney on Twitter at @rodneygedda. Rodney's e-mail address is rodney_gedda@idg.com.au. Follow TechWorld Australia on Twitter at @Techworld_AU.
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Comments
Michael
1
For the longest time I've found really silly the amount of attention people pay to such fluff as design, look and feel, the way mac users tend to. That, plus the fanboism and propaganda have always annoyed me.
I'm a programmer working in a team of 2. I use Ubuntu while my partner has a mac. I've noticed that he's very sensitive to what I referred to earlier as fluff. I'm more of a functionality kinda guy. Lately, I was showing off a new module that I had built for an application we're working on. While he appropriately appreciated the cleverness of the new plugin, he couldn't help but point out that I should probably change my buttons' theme to match the rest of the app.
That comment irked me a little. For starters, this was a prototype meant to highlight a functionality, not its look. Second, I've always considered design work to be "beneath" me and to be something of a douche-bag concern.
Now, to be honest, if he hadn't pointed it out, that's the way I would've left it. It was functional and user friendly, it just didn't look shiny. However, when I did change the look as he recommended, it added some pizazz to the whole thing and I was actually really happy that he had spotted this out.
Then I realized that it wasn't the first time we'd gone through a similar scenario. In the recent months I had come to rely on his ability to "prettify" most documents we're sending to clients. I would write a business proposal and he would reformat it a little, replace the fonts with some of the ones they have on the mac and we would send it.
I've come to the conclusion that, like me, some people have much less a sense of aesthetics than others and are much more attuned to functionality and usability. I suspect that most current linux users qualify as well. As long as something does the job well and efficiently, we don't care that it's in black and white with no butterflies. We somewhat lack the ability to focus on the ugly, we can however recognize the pretty.
Imho, that's been the problem with mass desktop linux adoption, the view that "details" don't count.
If Ubuntu's goal is to provide a free os that can compete with os x and windows at _every_ levels, then I applaud Canonical for setting the bar so high and I encourage them in this endeavor.
This move won't be without without kinks. It'll probably get worse before getting better. A lot better. Just keep a couple of facts in mind before spreading fud about this whole thing:
- very few apps are coded for x directly.
- they are rather built using toolkits such as gtk and qt,
- which both can run on top of wayland.
- apps written for gnome and kde can also run on unity.
- x will not be completely dropped either, you will be able to run it on top of wayland.
- x is old and a replacement is long overdue.
- it'll would be much easier to develop for wayland, even for qt and gtk devs.
- apple made a similar move for os x and it's worked out great for them.
Jon T. Rollins
2
Wow, more bad tech journalism. The author read a few mailing lists and a few fanboy sites and thinks he can draw in a few ad clicks with sensationalism. For shame.
Stop tapping away on that keyboard and read this: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
Sarmad
3
Well, now the first thing I do when I install Ubuntu is installing Gnome Shell. I am not a gnome developer nor even a linux developer, I'm just a linux user who thinks Unity is simply unusable regardless of whether it uses Wayland or X.