Unity and Trinity: New releases for forks of abandoned Linux desktops
- Reference: 1651680006
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/04/unity_trinity_desktops/
- Source link:
With public testing announced, [1]7.6 , which is the first update to Unity in six years, starts the process of modernizing Ubuntu's former desktop.
When it was still part of the Ubuntu distro, there were three separate branches of the Unity desktop. The original Unity desktop derived from [2]Ubuntu's special launcher for netbooks , and was [3]implemented as a plug-in for the [4]Compiz compositing window manager – itself now discontinued.
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The new version comes from [6]Ubuntu remix prodigy Rudra Saraswat . Saraswat has [7]plans for the development of a new Unity-like desktop, codenamed [8]UnityX .
[9]
[10]
In the meantime, though, he and collaborator [11]Khurshid Alam are working on fixing some of the issues with the old Unity7 codebase.
Both Unity7 and the planned UnityX are entirely separate and independent from Unity8, Ubuntu's planned touch-driven mobile desktop.
[12]
That isn't dead either: the [13]UBports community is continuing work , and has renamed the desktop [14]Lomiri .
Part of Ubuntu's problem was the size of its endeavors. Unity8 ran on [15]the Mir display server .
This meant that along with both a desktop UI and separate a mobile UI, plus the [16]Snap packaging format , Canonical was also working on [17]a new display server to replace [18]the now elderly X.org – duplicating much of the Wayland project.
[19]
Almost ironically, although Mir was perhaps a step too far, it survived when [20]Ubuntu killed Unity off in 2017 , and is still alive [21]today .
There was once a separate non-composited [22]Unity2D , like KDE built using the Qt toolkit. Unfortunately, it used Qt 4, unsupported since [23]2015 , and the effort needed to move it to Qt 5 or the new Qt 6 would be very considerable.
Speaking of KDE, the other desktop seeing some love is a new maintenance release, version [24]14.0.12 , of the Trinity project, a fork of KDE 3. KDE 4 appeared in 2008 and even then [25]annoyed our own [26]Steven J Vaughan-Nichols , and he [27]was not alone .
As well as moving to newer versions of Qt, KDE 4 and later 5 brought in new facilities, such as [28]"Plasmoid" desktop widgets. However, the newer versions also dropped basic functionality that some users liked, such as the ability for a single panel to [29]span multiple monitors. Even if you never wanted that, there's an obvious comparison with [30]Windows 11's inability to have a vertical taskbar .
KDE remains, as it has always been, highly customizable, but this shows an important lesson: one person's unimportant frippery is someone else's critical functionality. Freeing widgets from the panel and allowing them to run on the desktop may make for impressive tech demos, but it annoys users who just want to span their panel across the bottom of two screens.
With a widescreen display, horizontal space is plentiful, but vertical space becomes a premium feature. For the author, the way that Unity combined the top panel with the menu bar was a vital space-saver on a netbook and remains very useful today, when every monitor is a widescreen. If you have half a dozen windows, each with its own menu bar, that wastes a lot of vertical space, while [31]Unity conserves that . In-window menu bars also require precision mouse control, whereas the ergonomic principle called [32]Fitt's Law means that a screen edge is very easy to hit.
[33]Problems for the Linux kernel NTFS driver as author goes silent
[34]Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle
[35]Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling
[36]Fancy a remix? Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have also hit 22.04
GNOME eliminates this issue by simply removing menu bars altogether. However, concealing functionality behind hotkeys and hamburger menus leads to more time wasted hunting for functionality that used to be in plain view.
For the author, Unity combined the best of the Windows UI, such as window manipulation and a menu bar that could be controlled by standard keyboard shortcuts (alt+F for the File menu, for instance) together with macOS's efficient space usage.
The vertical app launcher used some of that plentiful screen width, while letting me see more of the document I was working on. Windows 11's mandatory horizontal taskbar, and the fat, graphical ribbons of modern Office apps, squander that precious space on a beginner-friendly UI, one that both gets in my way and leaves me less available workspace.
These may seem like small things, but such small [37]paper cuts add up. They are the reason that whole teams of people get together and fork abandoned projects to keep them alive.
Today, there are half a dozen teams all maintaining separate Linux desktops that replicate the Windows 95 UI. KDE and Trinity, plus LXQt, do it using the Qt toolkit. Xfce replicated it using Gtk 2, while MATE forked GNOME 2; both are now moving to Gtk 3. [38]Raspberry Pi's PIXEL forked and continues LXDE, while [39]Mint's Cinnamon replicated the look and feel by forking GNOME 3.
They're all in danger of being left behind as the GNOME Project [40]moves on with Gtk 4 . And let us not forget that the reason that the GNOME project began was not for any functional reason: it was because KDE used Qt, which back then was not GPL-licensed software, and it was mostly written in C++, while Unix traditionalists tend to favor plain old C.
Elementary OS's Pantheon desktop is superficially macOS-like, but lacks functionality like a global menu bar – or menu bars at all – meaning that its top panel is almost entirely wasted, empty space. That helps to motivate Unity, but there are currently two separate Unity-derived codebases moving forward (both versions 7 and 8), and possibly a new UnityX to replace Unity 7.
The [41]SolusOS Budgie environment does some of this too, on a GNOME basis, although it plans to [42]move to Enlightenment's EFL instead.
That's a huge amount of duplicated effort. Meanwhile, Linux desktop market share remains tiny, though [43]ChromeOS is selling strongly .
ChromeOS, like macOS, has none of this rich functionality or customizability. And yet, Macs far outsell all desktop Linux distros put together, and ChromeOS until recently [44]sold more units than Apple Macs .
Surely there's some lesson to take away from this. What was that old saying? Something about [45]divide and conquer ? ®
Get our [46]Tech Resources
[1] https://unity.ubuntuunity.org/blog/unity-7.6/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2008/06/04/ubuntu_netbook_remix_demonstrated/
[3] https://linux.fandom.com/wiki/Unity_2D
[4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Compiz
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YnL3iik--XBRsXbRxYNhMgAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/04/rudra_sarsawat_ubuntu_projects/
[7] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/restarting-unity-development-in-2021-progress-report/20217
[8] https://unityx.org/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnL3iik--XBRsXbRxYNhMgAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnL3iik--XBRsXbRxYNhMgAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/u/khurshid-alam
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnL3iik--XBRsXbRxYNhMgAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/07/ut_ota_21/
[14] https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/lomiri-new-name-same-great-unity8-115
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_with_mir_instead_of_x/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/linux_software_installation/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/05/canonical_mir_announcement/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintainer_declares/
[19] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnL3iik--XBRsXbRxYNhMgAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2017/04/05/ubuntu_euthanizes_unity/
[21] https://mir-server.io/
[22] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity2D
[23] https://www.qt.io/blog/2015/05/26/qt-4-8-7-released
[24] https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Release_Notes_For_R14.0.12
[25] https://practical-tech.com/2008/06/25/kde-404-bad-just-plain-bad/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/Author/Steven-J-Vaughan-Nichols/
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/05/linus_torvalds_reviews_kde/
[28] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Plasmoids
[29] https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=38969
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/26/openshell_windows_11/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2014/03/28/ubuntu_14_01_final_beta_review/
[32] https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/glance.html
[33] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/problems_for_the_linux_kernel_ntfs/
[34] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/pop_os_2204_is_here/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/
[36] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/ubuntu_unity_and_ubuntu_cinnamon/
[37] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts/Mission
[38] https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/28/raspberry_pi_adds_pixel_eye_candy_to_desktop_to_please_users/
[39] https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/29/cinnamon_2_0_review/
[40] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/28/gnome_42_inconsistent_themes/
[41] https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/08/solus_linux_review/
[42] https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/
[43] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/17/canalys_q3_pc/
[44] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/13/chroembook_sales_crash/
[45] https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
[46] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: YALD * 2
The downvotes are because you are talking like "Linux" is some sort of overarching corporation that doesn't know what it;s doing. The reality is that these are all groups of people who are probably not in contact with each or related in anyway, all doing their own thing because they want to. You are trying to shoehorn their activities into some sort of monolithic desktop like Apple or MS. Remember when MS tried to do "everything everywhere" with Windows8 and it's phone/touch oriented desktop? Or the current fad from MS to minimise the user desktop customisation options and force change on users just because they can? The world of Linux desktops is the antithesis to that.
You probably want to stop conflating "distros" with desktops too. There may be some overlap, but they are not the same thing at all. You can change either or both, but neither limits you to the other, except maybe in a few special cases.
Personally, I don't care that much. I'll stick with what is a regarded as a "mainstream" FreeBSD desktop purely because it's unlikely that some random update will change things either visibly or workflow-wise, but al power to those who want something different and are prepared to put the work into making what suits them.
Re: YALD * 2
You are correct about why I downvoted him. His rant reads like someone who tried Linux one time in 1998, couldn't get it to work and has hated it ever since.
Meanwhile, I'm happily doing everything I need to do on Fedora with the nice new Gnome desktop not caring how many other people agree with me.
Re: YALD * 2
Your downvotes are obviously for using Gnome, like a heathen, instead of the glory that is $DE_NAME.
Re: YALD * 2
"You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole." -- The Dude
I tend to agree that the Linux desktop world could use some consolidation. It would be kind of awesome if some of these teams could get together and coordinate their changes. There are clearly teams duplicating each others' efforts, when perhaps some of that developer time could be put into fit and finish rather than reimplementing the same basic UX metaphors in slightly different ways.
And before the socks-and-sandals brigade comes after me, I have multiple different Linux distros running in my house. The only one whose display manager I care about is running ZorinOS, which is, you know, fine , in the sense of looking pretty and being basically functional, but there are some truly head-scratching UI choices and some total failures of functionality.
Anyway, in my experience, Linux fanboys are like libertarians: they're all perfectly rational and correct, which is why no two of them ever agree on anything.
I get the fact that you (the article author) loved Unity as a desktop, and people are welcome to their opinions and experimentation and variety is a very good thing.
However, as a productive UI, Unity was appalling . It only worked if the user only had at most a couple of applications open, and in general terms, if the user only had a couple of applications that they ever wanted to open. Anything beyond that and an attention span of a gnat and the UI was barely usable at best. I am definitely not alone in ditching the distro as a result of the UI - I switched to another version with the crippling UI, and then switched to another entirely.
It's not that Unity couldn't have been fixed, and the operation of it amended so it was productive and usable and still kept some of the mechanisms... but the developers of it weren't interested in that and seemed to make it worse with every iteration.
It only worked if the user only had at most a couple of applications open, ...
Well, OK. But this just goes to the point that VoT [1] doesn't ever seem to get-- i.e. that different people have different needs, and that those different people will not infrequently find that they would rather use different sorts of desktop, even if they might not know which one straight away. And good luck to them all, their weird and inexplicable choices, and to the people who code up many the different options we have available.
Users aren't all the same, so neither do they need their desktops or software applications -to be all the same.
[1] VoT does have a point that excessive choice might be off-putting or disquieting to new users. But against that we should balance how the opposite "one-size-doesn't-fit-all" approach is quite off-putting [2] to those who do know what they want.
[2] Or, in my case, as regards Outlook, more "rage inducing" than "off-putting", given how useless, willfully obscure, and obstructive it seems. But of course if you happen to like it, then you choosing to use it yourself is just fine by me.
Am I old?
Or am I the only one that remembered "Trinity" as a howto guide for hardening and minimizing unix systems (referred in the documents as "sharpening" if I remember correctly, someone was probably reading star wars novels and had slicer envy.)?
I believe one of the base recommendations was to rip out the GUI entirely due to insecure network access in the x-server, enable and register per user keys in SSH, disable telnet and require SUDO instead of using root. Funny how that got abandoned and the name turned into another desktop environment. No surprise that the KDE refuseniks hadn't heard of it, and I can't really hold it against them, I tapped out and went to XFCE for the times I needed both linux and windows at the same time.
But I would be nice if a good step by step hardening guide was being maintained in a place that was public and reasonably easy to find. Now stuff is spread all over the place.
Re: Am I old?
Who remembers SATAN?
never got that
"If you have half a dozen windows, each with its own menu bar, that wastes a lot of vertical space"
Does it?
I find that only one window has my main attention, so much so that I often have it maximised. I freely admit to being a man and finding multitasking strange and alien.
When I first saw a Macintosh it had a really tiny monochrome screen and the single menu bar across the top of it seemed no more or less strange than any other UI paradigm. Today I can't understand in the slightest why a certain part of the globally shared screen real estate should belong exclusively to whichever app happens to have the focus.
Mind you, I also don't get the idea of non-trivial GUI applications not having any kind of readily identifiable menu at all. Are we reinventing WordPerfect?
-A.
YALD * 2
Here we go again. There's are good reasons why these distros wither away, the main one being not enough people use them. And why don't they use them? Cos there's not any compelling reason to do so. They are YALD.
-> When it was still part of the Ubuntu distro, there were three separate branches of the Unity desktop
Yes, take one think and immediately divert resources to maintaining three lots of it.
-> Saraswat has plans for the development of a new Unity-like desktop
Oh wow. That sound really good. But it gives me a sense of deja vu, like all the 500,000 other Linux distros.
-> Both Unity7 and the planned UnityX are entirely separate and independent from Unity8, Ubuntu's planned touch-driven mobile desktop. That isn't dead either: the UBports community is continuing work, and has renamed the desktop Lomiri.
Yes, because a rename is really essential to give a sense of continuity. What family of OS is Windows 11 from? Is it by chance from the same family as Windows 2000? Who would have thunk it? But in the Linux world we have Lomiri which used to be called Unity8. Go figure.
-> Canonical was also working on a new display server to replace the now elderly X.org – duplicating much of the Wayland project.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen in black and white: DUPLICATION, AKA wasted resources and effort.
-> However, concealing functionality behind hotkeys and hamburger menus leads to more time wasted hunting for functionality that used to be in plain view.
Let me shorten that for you: it's unfriendly and hard to use.
-> These may seem like small things, but such small paper cuts add up. They are the reason that whole teams of people get together and fork abandoned projects to keep them alive.
That's half the story. The other half, the first half, is that these paper cuts are why the projects are abandoned in the first place.
-> Today, there are half a dozen teams all maintaining separate Linux desktops
Only half a dozen? I reckon that figure is under counted by at least 500 times.
-> it was mostly written in C++, while Unix traditionalists tend to favor plain old C
And now we have people demanding to rewrite things in Rust. Not to get ahead, just to get to where we are now.
-> That's a huge amount of duplicated effort.
Thank you again for mentioning the work DUPLICATED. It is also wasted effort.
-> Something about divide and conquer?
The Linux desktop groups have divided and conquered themselves. Instead of a couple of large settlements, there are now hundreds of villages. A quick history lesson: villages had to reach a size of about 500 people before they could begin to sustain themselves. The Linux world has hundreds of unsustainable villages.
I expect to receive down votes from people who don't like my ladle of truth. The Year of the Linux Desktop is nearly here.