Trying Out Unity 8 + Mir On Ubuntu 17.04

[paupav]

Unity 8 feels so fluid and awesome I can't even explain why is it so good.

[wswartzendruber]

I tried Unity 8 (17.04) in VirtualBox a couple days ago and was impressed with how far it's come in six months. What's of particular interest to me is how they haven't given up on Convergence, which nobody seems to be talking about anymore. If they can succeed, they will completely blow Microsoft's Continuum out of the water by not having things so restricted on mobile. In essence, Continuum is a half-way attempt at what Convergence has aspired to achieve. So yes, Microsoft was first, but I don't see them catching up by April 2018. Their biggest obstacle, of course, is running x86 code on ARM devices.

[bwat47]

You're saying its not immature?
Unity 8 and Mir are experimental technology, its not even shipped by default it is under heavy development, its not mature, its not proven. It is immature. Unity 8 is not polished, it barely works, lots of things are broken.

Maybe you could argue those points for Unity 7 on X.Org but not for Unity 8 on Mir.

I was talking about unity 7.

Obviously unity 8, which is still under heavy development is still buggy.... News at 11

[uid313]

It's not immature or redundant. IMO it's one of the most polished linux desktop environments there is at the moment. I like it because it's polished and easy to use like gnome, but doesn't have horrific performance like gnome-shell. It also has the best default keyboard shortcuts I've seen in a DE, as well as the most ergonomic layout for laptop.

You're saying its not immature?
Unity 8 and Mir are experimental technology, its not even shipped by default it is under heavy development, its not mature, its not proven. It is immature. Unity 8 is not polished, it barely works, lots of things are broken.

Maybe you could argue those points for Unity 7 on X.Org but not for Unity 8 on Mir.

[bwat47]

Unity 8 and Mir doesn't excite me. It is immature and redundant.
I am much more excited by GNOME on Wayland, with the classic extensions.

It's not immature or redundant. IMO it's one of the most polished linux desktop environments there is at the moment. I like it because it's polished and easy to use like gnome, but doesn't have horrific performance like gnome-shell. It also has the best default keyboard shortcuts I've seen in a DE, as well as the most ergonomic layout for laptop.

[Charlie68]

.... it is unfortunate that some people are so biased on Ubuntu and Canonical, they have certainly made mistakes, but they make me sick certain attitudes of professors of some users.
Unity 8 on my notebook AMD works well, I have watched streaming movies and played supertuxkart. It 'still an experimental version this does not quite work, but there has been significant steps forward and deny it is foolish.
Unfortunately it has become impossible to discuss these things peacefully here, too many prejudices. As more Linux users get hurt yourself, sad consideration.

[Vistaus]

This is just bullshit. Mir is progressing nicely, it's more than just a protocol, it's a display server.




Windows is standard on Desktop, so maybe you should drop Linux altogether on your machines.



I may sound like an Ubuntu fanboy on this forum, I'm not. I'm interested in free software and it's developments, but you guys have to admit that you are ridiculously biased against Canonical and you are doing more damage to this community than helping with this toxic behavior.

So I'm biased against Canonical because I don't like on of their products? FYI: I do like Ubuntu Touch on my BQ Aquaris M10 and have used Ubuntu and Kubuntu for years and have helped out the Dutch Ubuntu community (Ubuntu-NL) for years as well. (you can check Ubuntu-NL for yourself if you don't believe me) Why am I not allowed to dislike one product? Why does disliking one product of a company and community I've supported for years, online and IRL, make me a "toxic hater"?

You know, I don't wanna sound petty but you actually did kinda hurt my feelings. I've spent so much of my spare time to help out the (Dutch) Ubuntu community, even helping people get on the Ubuntu train at Release Parties every LTS and at other tech events (which all took me all day to do, including traveling to and from those locations!). I've also tried to set up a LoCo in my city (which failed, but I did try!). I'm still semi-active in the Dutch community and am one the few website editors. And I did all of that despite the fact that I have EDS and (mild) social anxiety. But the one time I'm critical of a Canonical product someone like you starts calling me "toxic" and "biased" and stuff... Gee, thanks. Feel like I've done it all for nothing all of these years...

[Scellow]

I'd like to respond to a few of your points:
Michael, clearly stated that MIR and Unity 8 aren't default yet.
This being an enthusiast website i think that a review makes perfect sense, wouldn't you agree? Now people know the state of things, whatever that state may be. As you said yourself, "Free Software is kind of like sausages: delicious and satisfying but it can be a little disturbing to watch how it's made.".

Now my 2 bucks on Unity and MIR:
-I remember Ubuntu 10.10 (the last one i actually used). At that time Canonical used to keep improving Gnome 2 and adding stuff that sould've always been there. Unfortunately the Gnome folks were slow to adopt Canonicals great contributions into upstream, and that certainly had bad effects on the development of Ubuntu.
Then Gnome 3 came out and it was unstable and incomplete, to say the least. Canonical was forced to make a choice and made the right one by creating Unity, IMO.
But the problems started there: by not listening to it's userbase and allowing simple, basic stuff like moving the Unity bar to the bottom or enabling/disabling auto/hide, they basically alienated their users... They effectively did something similar to the Gnome folks.
-Then we have Wayland. While Wayland is a protocol and MIR is a compositor, comparing them is natural/fair because to use Wayland we have to use a Wayland compatible Compositor and Canonical chose MIR over Wayland. At the time Mark's excuse was that there were impossible to achieve with Wayland, which turned out to be a lie. Nowadays the excuse seems to have shifted into trying to make it look like it's faster make a compositor from scratch than contributing to a nearly finnished protocol and adapting it's proposed compositor with the changes you need...

But the worst of it all: is that they didn't have to make Unity and Gnome incompatible. Or Unity and Wayland incompatible. But they did, because they suffer from the 'not developed by us' syndrome. It's a thing, and all one has to do is look at the facts critically.

Bottom line: it's not really what they do, just HOW they do it...

Maybe because time has proven that Gnome is not trustable, each release break everything, each features only exist because their ego is as big as my a$$, each new stable release means it wasn't tested, they don't listen to their user base, they try to mimic Apple but they only take the bad stuff

[Cerberus]

I would love to contribute to testing Unity 8 and Mir, but Noveuau hard locks Unity 8 not long after I log in, it is one of the known bugs, but I have Nvidia so that is a show stopper for me, I hope it will be fixed soon.

[bregma]

I'd like to respond to a few of your points:
Michael, clearly stated that MIR and Unity 8 aren't default yet.
This being an enthusiast website i think that a review makes perfect sense, wouldn't you agree? Now people know the state of things, whatever that state may be.

Yes, I agree. I was being sincere and heartfelt. I appreciate that Michael did not gloss over or hold back on flaws, and that he did express appreciation for good points too. This was neither a fanboi review nor a hater screed but a neutral report of one user's experience at one point in time before release.