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Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light
Mark Shuttleworth takes a look at an
Ubuntu experience mainly designed for dual-boot netbooks. "A few
months ago we took on the challenge of building a version of Ubuntu for the
dual-boot, instant-on market. We wanted to be surfing the web in under 10
seconds, and give people a fantastic web experience. We also wanted it to
be possible to upgrade from that limited usage model to a full desktop.
The fruit of that R&D is both a new desktop experience codebase, called
Unity, and a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop,
that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios."
(Log in to post comments)
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 19:21 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Question:
How does Unity fit in with the move to EFL for ARM netbooks?
Unity uses clutter.. and my understanding is that clutter is designed specifically to take advantage of accelerated graphics hardware.
The move to EFL for ARM netbook targets was justified specifically because it doesn't require any accelerated graphics.
These development are sort of in conflict. Actually its not really sort of. They are directly competing because you can run the EFL based launcher on intel as equally to ARM...and it has its own design estatic.
If EFL on ARM is a short term compromise, and Unity represents a long term design vision. Is Canonical going to commit resources necessary to get open accelerated graphics drivers for the ARM graphics into the mainstream kernel? Or are they basically just saying that whatever usability enhancements Unity brings to the table...won't be available for Ubuntu ARM users (unless through OEM pre-installs which include proprietary drivers)
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 20:10 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> How does Unity fit in with the move to EFL for ARM netbooks?
It does not look like it does fit in at all.
Of course it does not make sense to cripple performance and features for x86 Linux desktop because ARM graphics situation sucks badly. For modern desktop and notebook systems a GPU is a requirement to meet the needs of desktop users in terms of battery usage, video playback, and so on and so forth.
> Unity uses clutter.. and my understanding is that clutter is designed specifically to take advantage of accelerated graphics hardware.
Clutter uses OpenGL for 'full systems' and can use OpenGL ES for embedded systems. Neither of these APIs require any sort of hardware acceleration to function, but off course for maximum performance and efficiency a GPU is extremely desirable.
For what its worth the Mesa folks are working on a modern software renderer; Gallium LLVMpipe renderer. This provides to vast improvements in performance for non-accelerated OpenGL graphics compared to traditional Mesa renderer. It should make it possible to have composited OpenGL desktops be usable on non-accelerated systems.
> Is Canonical going to commit resources necessary to get open accelerated graphics drivers for the ARM graphics into the mainstream kernel?
I really doubt it's within their power; even if they wanted to.
> Or are they basically just saying that whatever usability enhancements Unity brings to the table...won't be available for Ubuntu ARM users (unless through OEM pre-installs which include proprietary drivers)
Sounds like it. If you want a good desktop environment with decent performance on Linux using open source graphics drivers then you'll want to stay away from any ARM system or Intel embedded systems (Intel is licensing the PowerVR stuff again for their Moorestown stuff (aka GMA 600), apparently, which is developed by a OSS-unfriendly company).
You'll want to stick with ATI or Intel 'larger' type systems if you care about performance and open source drivers.
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 20:26 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
"Sounds like it. If you want a good desktop environment with decent performance on Linux using open source graphics drivers then you'll want to stay away from any ARM system or Intel embedded systems (Intel is licensing the PowerVR stuff again for their Moorestown stuff (aka GMA 600), apparently, which is developed by a OSS-unfriendly company)."
But Unity isn't meant primarily for desktop environments..its meant for netbooks. A year out from now how much of the netbook market will be using PowerVR? If Intel also headed towards PowerVR again...its unclear why Unity is a winning design approach for netbooks moving forward..unless its going to be an OEM-specific offering that is coupled with factory installed proprietary drivers.
Even if you can do software rendering with clutter..won't that significantly impact battery life and be a net negative for netbook users? Sure it looks shiny...but if the software rendering is a significant drain on your battery. And isn't extended battery life one of the key selling points for these devices?
I'm just sort of left scratching my head.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 20:54 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> But Unity isn't meant primarily for desktop environments..its meant for netbooks. A year out from now how much of the netbook market will be using PowerVR?
Hopefully very few. The proprietary Intel drivers suck balls no matter what and renders system using them pretty much non-starters for a good Linux system no matter how you shake it.
But on those systems Ubuntu would probably have the proprietary driver bundled with it. A OEM installing Ubuntu into the 'firmware' for a 'instant on' environment should be able to provide accelerated graphics without too much heartache.
The OEM market is who Ubuntu is targeting with this sort of thing, it seems like.
> Even if you can do software rendering with clutter..won't that significantly impact battery life and be a net negative for netbook users?
Possibly. If it's done efficiently then composited desktops have some advantages over non-composited systems in terms of efficiencies.
For example: When moving windows around you have to continuously re-render them on a non-composited system... while on a composited desktop your just moving a textured square around and only have to render the final scene, which is much more efficient.
If you are able to tune the eye candy down (like don't update window contents when switching windows) then performance should be roughly on par.
A lot of the poor performance on Linux for composited desktops is has to do much more with the poorly designed driver model Linux has (and is slowly moving away from*) and excessive eye candy effects rather then any sort of inefficiency built-into the composited desktop concept.
*with texture management being handled by the kernel (via DRI2/KMS/UXA/etc) the performance difference between Metacity versus gnome-shell is pretty minor for most things.
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 21:54 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Yes an OEM pre-install only is how I look at the focus.
But again... the whole concept of Ubuntu on ARM is something I expect to be primarily OEM pre-install.. so the EFL work is still sort of a head scratcher in context since according to Shuttleworth they've been working towards Unity since before gnome-shell development started. From the outside the netbook strategy Canonical is pursuing looks sort of fractured.
My concern about how ARM fits in isn't a hypothetical. Dell's existing "Latitude On" instant-on offering has an option where you use a dedicated ARM chip to get ridiculously long battery life out of the laptop. Does Canonical really have the ability to support diverging Canonical's ARM and instant-on work? I would have thought that the actual market for these things is converging..not diverging.
The instant-on usage scenario is very different than even a netbook. The OS can live in its own little dedicated small pool of flash memory...and its deliberately treated as a static image with an application set defined by the OEM factory install (or firmware upgrade.) It really doesn't play to Ubuntu's strengths of upgradability and wide application choice. What can Canonical bring to an OEM instant-on Ubuntu that DeviceVM's SplashTop isn't already? Dell,HP,Sony, Acer, Lenovo... they all have SplashTop based instant-on offerings right now. DeviceVM really seems like the big dog in the space.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 23:18 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Yeah. I think I understand a bit better what your saying now.
After looking at some screenshots and whatnot it looks like the EFL is just a 'lite' clone of the existing Ubuntu netbook remix UI (I am a happy netbook remix user right now). The EFL is obviously designed to look and behave very similarly.
So if they continue this trend they will probably just modify EFL to look and behave like a stripped down version of Unity and then offer both interfaces to the OEMs and usage of either one or the other would be based on system resources.
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 10, 2010 20:40 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Clutter pretty much requires hardware acceleration according to
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-Ap...
Since he is the maintainer of clutter, doesn't look like software acceleration is a feasible option.
For FOSS drivers on the desktop atleast, Red Hat has heavy investment on both GNOME Shell and Xorg and getting closer to the goal where we can take hardware acceleration support for granted out of the box. Intel is already covered. Fedora 12 has experimental 3D support for ATI. Fedora 13 will have 3D acceleration for ATI out of the box via the Radeon driver. Fedora 13 will have experimental 3D support for Nvidia cards via the Nouveau driver and it is likely to move from experimental to stable status by the next release even if performance might not match the non-free drivers.
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 11, 2010 1:34 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
LLVMPipe is great, with them I can get Hedgewars running at 1920x1080 resolution on my work computer without problems (Nouveau 3D driver crashes hard after a few minutes).
I can even get a composited desktop with LLVMPipe.
But it's nowhere fast enough to work smoothly on low-power ARM CPUs.
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 11, 2010 6:22 UTC (Tue) by dmitrij.ledkov (subscriber, #63320) [Link]
I don't believe ubuntu light is targetting ARM at all. From the announcement keynote I got the impression that they want to have Ubuntu Light on the SSD partition & be able to scale from instant-on to full blown ubuntu desktop when the user is ready. (e.g. I can't install gimp without eating more chunk of windows partition. Eat now? [Yes] [Yes]). [2]
Note in [1] and various meeting reports (e.g. kernel team) they have been doing loads of work on arm & dell hardware. Is dell shipping any arm stuff at all?
It would be cool to have commercial arm netbooks/laptops with ubuntu but I haven't seen any in wild yet.
[1] http://www.canonical.com/products/unity
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 15, 2010 20:13 UTC (Sat) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
> It would be cool to have commercial arm netbooks/laptops with ubuntu
Sharp is shipping one:
http://conics.net/catalog/product_info.php?currency=USD&...
I have one. It's awesome. But I don't questions from onlookers like I did with my Asus EEEPC 701. I think that's because people just assume it's just an oversized texting phone.
On the downside, it's not cheap and you do have to import from Japan. And it doesn't run Lucid (yet, I'm sure it's possible).
On the plus side, the suspend works for days, and I can carry it around everywhere. This is unlike the EEEPC, which always felt like a burden to carry around (and I quite often left it home, then wished I didn't).
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 17, 2010 19:38 UTC (Mon) by hackerb9 (guest, #21928) [Link] Wow, that Netwalker looks sweet. It reminds me of the days when I had an HP 200LX; it was the perfect size for carrying everywhere, but powerful enough to do "real" computing tasks. ("Powerful" here meaning an 80186 processor). I wouldn't buy a Netwalker, though. Being able to touch-type on the keyboard is critical for a Unix-geek like me. I've actually realized recently that, what with bluetooth, the tiny keyboards being built into everything nowadays are just a waste of space. It's funny that you should mention that onlookers don't ask about your Netwalker because they assume it's a phone. I've got the opposite situation. People are constantly asking me about my phone because I'm using it like a laptop, "What is that thing!? Where can I get a computer like that?" It's an OpenMoko Freerunner running Linux. Just pair it with Apple's small, light, and cheap bluetooth keyboard, and you've got a dandy little Unix machine. --b9
Shuttleworth: Unity, and Ubuntu Light Posted May 17, 2010 20:51 UTC (Mon) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
Yes, I had a HP 200LX too. The keyboard was excellent, but the software was terrible even for MS. (Word documents couldn't handle tables. Notepad was limited to 32KB.)
The NetWalker keyboard is fairly weak, but not so bad if you compare to phone keyboards. At least it's pretty much a full keyboard (I haven't found any missing keys yet).
I've never tried non-integrated keyboards for 3 reasons:
For Ubuntu, you need a keyboard a lot more often than a special-purpose OS. My favourite feature of the NetWalker is that it has a "real browser" (adblock, greasemonkey, firebug, etc.). There are even some plugins for "drag to scroll" via the touchscreen.
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