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Ubuntu 11.04 to ship Unity as default interface |
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Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has said that Ubuntu would shift to Unity as the common interface for both the Desktop and Netbook editions starting with the operating system's next release in April 2011.  Unity was introduced as the interface for the Netbook edition in the latest 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release earlier this month. The next release, christened Natty Narwhal or 11.04, will feature the interface as default on the desktop version as well, for systems that have hardware that supports multitouch and/or 2D and/or 3D interfaces. Vintage systems will continue to be able to use the GNOME desktop as default.The decision to move to Unity, labeled both risky and significant, has its roots in a number of reasons. Foremost are the significant differences with the developers of GNOME, an open source project led by the GNOME Foundation, such as GNOME's rejection of global menus, use of the new Mutter window manager in lieu of Compiz and abandoning the contextually aware Zeitgeist. Then there was also the need to make the distribution more relevant to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Dell. Unity, as a default interface, could potentially have benefits for quality assurance and may even simplify the process for OEMs to integrate and support the OS across their platforms and product lines. Shuttleworth announced the change in his keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit currently underway at Orlando, Florida, which closes on October 29th. UDS is the Ubuntu event where the company and the community defines the focus and plans for upcoming versions of Ubuntu, congregating Canonical engineers, community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and more into an environment focused on discussion and planning. He called Unity a fully open source project, one that is devoid of any plans of proprietary extensions and placed multitouch support high on the priority list, envisioning that multitouch hardware would eventually be omnipresent in portable computers, which is where Unity would eventually and most definitely score. Even so, users will continue to have the option of using GNOME, either manually, or if determined at the time of installation basis the hardware. GNOME and KDE applications too would work as usual under Unity, though it would most likely feature some changes in file management. |
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