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Canonical

Canonical

Posted Sep 7, 2010 18:59 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: Canonical by kragil
Parent article: LC Brazil: Consumers, experts, or admins?

I really don't think you can single Canonical out about wanting to offer a differentiated user interface with their Unity offering. They aren't the only ones building differentiated interfaces. Meego has a differentiated user interface which leveraged existing Gnome technologies. Litl's interface is essential a differentiated (and proprietary) user interface on top of GNOME technologies (and derived from Ubuntu as well, but doesn't actually use any of Canonical's in-house built technologies afaik).

Canonical's OEM servicing business strategy really puts them in a tough position because its ultimately OEM interests which are driving what Canonical is building in-house. If OEMs want a differentiated stack and want it by a specific delivery date... who other than Canonical is there expressing an interest in being paid to do the work? If there were not OEMs looking for differentiated stack, Canonical wouldn't be building them.

Take for an historic example the Mi interface created by Canonical and paid for by HP. Unity could end up just like the Mi interface, functional and utterly forgotten once its clear that the software doesn't actually help the sponsoring OEMs sell devices. We really won't know the fate of Unity until we start seeing how the Unity based OEM pre-installs from Canonical partners fare in the marketplace.

-jef


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Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 11:29 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, Nokias(and Intels?) vision for Meego has no GTK in it. I wouldn't call that Gnome tbh. The GTK/Clutter stuff is Intel/Moblin legacy cruft.
And I wouldn't blame the OEMs as much. Canonical doesn't want to be your regular Linux distro vendor anymore. That is why I said that Ubuntu _Desktop_ (think even 11.10) will most likely not ship with Gnome 3.0. Canonical can't outdo RH/Novell on that one, so they will avoid that battle altogether and ship a pimped Unity (or something along those lines) with the default desktop. They picked that name for a reason, they want it on netbooks, desktops and touch devices.
They still profit from new Gnome technologies (Mutter, Clutter, etc), but what the user sees will be totally under their control and effectively create (albeit very weak) lock-in. Building your own UI ontop of Mutter/Clutter/JS is still hard, but not nearly as hard as it used to be.

Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 11:30 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (2 responses)

When I say Gnome 3.0. I mean Gnome-shell.

Editor: How is the temporary edit button coming along. Thinking before writing is not my cup of tea.

Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 14:43 UTC (Wed) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Last I knew, it was NOTABUG. I tend to agree with this assessment.

Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 15:38 UTC (Wed) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]

Though it is also against my nature, I personally prefer "more thinking, less writing" over the alternative.

Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 18:26 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Pardon. No gtk in it?
http://meego.com/developers/meego-architecture
I see gtk and friends listed in middleware. And the available meego 1.0 live images for netbooks still depend on gtk heavily do they not? It's only the other targets like the handset target that is qt based.

No matter. Even if it moves completely to Qt and uses the same infrastructure that underpins KDE's netbook interface its still a _differentiated_ UI purpose built for consumer device targets. So the point I'm trying to make is still valid. Meego like Moblin and Maemo before it are all purpose built differentiated UIs that leverage technologies that are shared with other interface concepts.

The fact that Meego envisions jumping toolkits is immaterial to the market forces driving differentiated UI in consumer devices. Though I will say its interesting that no one in the laypress..even here..has really picked up on the touch framework work that meego has been slugging away at quietly leveraging qt. My understanding is the meego handset and in-vehicle 1.0 releases both make use of the meego touch framework. It would be interesting to see a well written comparison between meego's touch framework and the framework that Canonical put together.

-jef


Canonical

Posted Sep 8, 2010 20:56 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

The _vision_ (long term) has no more GTK. Older documents were clearer in that they clearly said that GTK is for lecacy/compatibility.
Other pages on meego.com make that fairly clear
http://meego.com/developers/meego-developer-story
http://meego.com/developers/meego-api

Anyways, the point I wanted to make is that Canonical wants Ubuntu to be its own thing and that is not only the due to the OEMs.


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