Canonical's Working On A Unity 2D Desktop

[Decatf]

They appear to be jumping on the "looks-nice"-train without knowing what they get themselves into.

That right there describes the mentality of the majority of the new users coming to Ubuntu.

[KDesk]

Unity 2D depends on Qt and GTK+ It is the best solution for the toolkit wars.

[mat69]

What's with all that crap?
First Clutter -- now relatively fast btw. -- then Compiz and now Compiz and Qt?
What the heck, do they have any brains there?
Constantly waisting resources by recreating stuff and then throwing it away.
_Focus_ ffs.

I mean heck for years people were told this and that can't be on the cd because of the lack of space. Now what? Now there is mono on it, soon also Qt?
That is a mess nothing else. How much code will they be able to reuse if they want to stick with Compiz? How much time will it be to make both look alike?
Or will it end with a total drop of Unity in favor of the then finished Gnome 3.0 with their shell?

They appear to be jumping on the "looks-nice"-train without knowing what they get themselves into.

[BlackStar]

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terribly confusing name, given that Unity is also the name of a popular game dev platform (if you're on Windows or Mac for now)? Why was this sort of name collision allowed to happen?

That one is called "Unity3d" (one word). Great engine but it doesn't run on Linux and doesn't support quad-buffer stereo - otherwise I'd be using it myself.

There are worse name collisions out there. For instance, both X and Microsoft call their input APIs XInput. Meh.

[leif81]

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terribly confusing name, given that Unity is also the name of a popular game dev platform (if you're on Windows or Mac for now)? Why was this sort of name collision allowed to happen?

Given that one is a desktop and the other is a game engine...I think the world will go on :P

[BlackStar]

Guys, there isn't the Clutter backend no longer exists. Srsly.

There is absolutely no chance they will ever drop the new Compiz backend in favor of Qt. This suggestion is impossible, counter-productive and I don't like it.

[Wyatt]

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terribly confusing name, given that Unity is also the name of a popular game dev platform (if you're on Windows or Mac for now)? Why was this sort of name collision allowed to happen?

[ioannis]

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

my thoughts exactly

[BlackStar]

Wait, but the gtk+ libs in 11.04 will be version 3.0?

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively - they wouldn't have to bother creating a 2D backend now, besides, nowadays relatively powerful graphics cards are present even on ARM hardware so the 2D backend will die in a few years anyway (when proper drivers are present) while the qualitative open-source graphics drivers will last for a long time and will benefit a lot more projects than just Unity and will be a serious argument that Canonincal doesn't do only what benefits it directly from (not to open this debate/flame, but you know there are certain companies claiming so).

That would still leave Poulsbo/Via/S3/etc users SOL. A 2d backend makes more sense here.

[BlackStar]

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

The clutter version was dropped two months ago.