Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 5, 2010 19:30 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland by gmaxwell
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

The computer's behavior should consist mostly of deterministic direct responses to my actions so that I should almost never need help figuring out what it has done.

That's only likely to be true for UI limited tasks. I expect my computer to be doing many things at once. Some of those tasks are things that don't and can't happen instantly because they require substantial processing or data retrieval time. Many of them are background tasks that are running without requiring my explicit instructions every time. I want feedback about what's happening with those tasks, and some kind of unobtrusive desktop effect can be a better way of providing it than yet another message window popping up.

And that's just for desktop notification type effects. There are other useful things you can do with graphics. For example, I find that I wind up with overlapping windows fairly regularly, even though I have a very large monitor with multiple virtual desktops. I like some of the eye-candy effects that are used to help out with that problem- translucent window borders, temporarily reconfiguring the desktop so I can see miniature versions of all windows, etc. Those kinds of effects may not be vital, but they make the system easier to use- which should be the single biggest goal of development.