Unity 8 Continues To Improve, But Still Has Rough Edges

[r_a_trip]

I wonder if at any point we'll see Canonical re-evaluate Wayland and switch back from Mir?

Possible, but unlikely. Unity 8 is built on top of Mir. Rewriting the UI stack again is probably too costly. Unity 8 is delayed as it is.

Or even for the Wayland folks to evaluate Mir?

That is highly unlikely. Abandoning Wayland now would put KDE, Gnome and Enlightenment in a very awkward position. These DE projects are in the final stages of finishing their Wayland compositors. Switching to Mir would mean they would have to refactor their Window manager/compositor's a second time and it would delay the roll out of the next gen display stacks yet again.

[Azpegath]

"Whenever you have a new DE (which Unity 8 effectively is) and the latest UI toolkit (Qt 5) you have to be concerned about performance and resource use, and given the bleeding-edge nature of Unity 8 on the desktop, I was expecting to sacrifice some CPU cycles, battery life and RAM. If anything, the opposite was the case. I get at least as many hours on my battery as I do with Unity 7, and I was using less than half the RAM I typically do."

This is still extremely interesting. I wish Canonical the best in what they do, and that they create a competitive new DE.

[blackout23]

Or even for the Wayland folks to evaluate Mir?

I think Mir would first have to show any benefits over using Wayland.

[Passso]

It is not a final release, maybe the work is almost done but not merged. A lot of people here smash Ubuntu a bit fast...

[AlanGriffiths]

Hell, yes. Though in this case, I think it's less the Mir vs Wayland part, and more the design of Unity 8... that's a *very* big project, more ambitious than Gnome 3 or KDE 5 were, and both of those projects took a lot of time for a lot of people.

This has always been a problem for Canonical... the urge to do everything themselves, while lacking the resources to complete even one of the large projects they started.

Yes, it is demonstrably not the Mir vs Wayland part: Mir provides examples (mir_demo_server and mir_proving_server) that support multiple windows per application. You can even run GTK and SDL applications on these. As these are examples, not real desktop environments, the experience isn't great, but multi-window support has been available at that level for years.

The priority of Unity8 development has been the phone UI - which is a released, supported product. That hasn't needed all of the features required on desktop.

The "Dogfooding" article shows Canonical being open about what still needs to be done for an acceptable desktop experience. Progress is being made on desktop support, but it is early in the 16.10 development cycle and some vital features have not landed. That is not failure.

[Delgarde]

The "Dogfooding" article shows Canonical being open about what still needs to be done for an acceptable desktop experience. Progress is being made on desktop support, but it is early in the 16.10 development cycle and some vital features have not landed. That is not failure.

Well, it sort of is, since it's been delayed an awful lot, thanks in part to scope creep. From what I understood, Unity 8 wasn't supposed to be all that different from current versions - just implemented on Mir instead of X11. But then they started doing stuff like phones, and distracted themselves from delivering on the desktop - even though desktop was their traditional strength, and they knew nothing about doing phones, and never had a hope of winning any significant market share in mobile.

[Michael_S]

I think the real takeaway from the article is nothing more and nothing less than "Unity 8 still needs a lot of work before mainstream release". And Canonical clearly knows that.

If they make Unity 8 the Ubuntu default in some release and still don't have multiple window support, then we can all blast Canonical for being idiotic.

Well, it sort of is, since it's been delayed an awful lot, thanks in part to scope creep. From what I understood, Unity 8 wasn't supposed to be all that different from current versions - just implemented on Mir instead of X11. But then they started doing stuff like phones, and distracted themselves from delivering on the desktop - even though desktop was their traditional strength, and they knew nothing about doing phones, and never had a hope of winning any significant market share in mobile.

I believe you are wrong. I think the whole reason Mir was created was because of the shift to focus on Ubuntu for mobile devices. The original blog posts announcing Mir justified its creation by claiming it would work better than Wayland in mobile and low-resource environments.

As far as I know, those claims about Mir vs. Wayland have since been refuted. But the fact that Canonical broke from Wayland for the sake of mobile means that Unity 8 was always about convergence.

[mhall119]

"one window per app [...] and other minor annoyances"

One window per app and he calls that a "minor annoyance"?!?

Those are Larabel's words, not mine. This is how I described it:

This doesn’t matter so much for native apps, which were build under this restriciton, and the terminal app having tabs was a saving grace here. But for legacy apps it presents a bigger issue, especially apps like GTG (Getting Things Gnome) where multi-window is a requirement.

[mhall119]

From what I understood, Unity 8 wasn't supposed to be all that different from current versions - just implemented on Mir instead of X11. But then they started doing stuff like phones, and distracted themselves from delivering on the desktop

No, Unity 8 was being developed for phones right from the start. The goal was to adapt the Unity 7 *metaphors* (launcher, unity panel, dash, etc), not the code, to mobile touch screens. Now the task at hand is combining the features of both Unity 7 and 8 into a single implementation of those components.

[bregma]

The multiple-windows-per-app thing is actually a window management integration problem between legacy X11 applications running in a container and the Unity 8 window manager running outside the container. Unity does not simply re-implement the X11 window management specifications because there's no point in replacing X11 with something identical and containing all its its flaws and disadvantages, so there is an impedance mismatch that has to be addressed.

This is neither a design flaw nor a failure to account for multiple windows from the start: it's just something on the list of things to be perfected before release. Work is in progress.

Software is kind of like sausages. With open source software, you get to see how the sausage is made, and it may upset some with a more delicate disposition. If you saw what went in to closed-source sausage you would probably become vegan.