Tag unity

Some thoughts on Ubuntu Unity

A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point […]

Ubuntu Unity: Just Bad.

Ubuntu Unity is Canonical's netbook UI, introduced in Ubuntu 10.10. It is, by far, the worst netbook graphical shell I've ever used: extremely slow on Atom-based netbooks, clumsy, inconsistent and of arguable 'retro' æsthetics reminiscent of 1990s NeXTSTEP and clones, only with half of the usability those had. Needless to say, vanilla GNOME with Docky as a launcher is --- in my opinion --- a vastly superior and usable solution for both netbook and desktop use, until something better (viz. GNOME 3.0) comes along. So, it seemed almost like a joke when Shuttleworth announced earlier today, as reported by the linked Ars Technica article that Ubuntu 11.04 won't feature the GNOME Shell, but Unity as the default shell, for both the netbook and desktop editions. Pathetic, really, no matter how you slice it.

VMWare Workstation 6.5β

VMWare has a beta testing programme for its venerable virtualisation software VMWare Workstation. Version 6.5 is going to add a number of very impressive and long-awaited features such as the Unity feature (pioneered in VMWare Fusion on the Mac), proper 3D acceleration support for Windows machines (yes, this means Direct X 9.0c and most probably, yes this means games and a whole slew of applications previously impossible to run under VMWare). I'll be giving Beta 1 a try in the next few weeks and I'll report here if anything worth mentioning comes up. I'd be very much interested to find what the pricing of this upgrade will be for owners of Workstation 6.0.