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rylexr — A better Ubuntu Unity Launcher - Part I
by-nc-sa
Published: 2012-07-13 03:36:54 +0000 UTC; Views: 20765; Favourites: 42; Downloads: 150
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Description
A mockup with "recommendations" for Ubuntu Unity. Ubuntu is great. Can we make it better?Related content
Comments: 28
Wonderful ideas! I hope this gets the attention of a Canonical dev.
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While I'm not too fond of the icon theme used in this mockup. I like the ideas that you present here.
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I absolutely agree it would look much better. Never really understood why the launcher icons look so ugly.
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when can I have this? I think this looks great!
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talk about timing.
something like the groups feature appeared called "drawers":
[link]
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Great mockup! It might be a good idea to try to get some of your ideas merged with the Unity Spread designs which are proposed for Ubuntu 12.10. Check out the Canonical Design Blog: [link]
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Love this mockup, the idea of the "icons group" and the visual effect for the focused applications are amazing!
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You must send it to Canonical. It's much better than the standard Unity. Excellent mockup.
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[link] , is that what you mean, Sir 
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I don't get it why doesn't someone fork unity and apply this cool stuff to it?
AFAIK Unity is open source.The only problem in here is the lack of developer support for unity forks.
That is kinda weird because gnome-shell got forked into cinnamon.
Judging from that it seems that people are more eager to fork gnome-shell than unity,even though they are both open source.
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Complexity is the problem, gnome-shell is based on a whole bunch of standard tech with libraries. OTOH Unity is programmed directly into the GL shaders and the code ain't too clear or modular.
I've looked at the code, I'm still recovering.
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Yep, I prefer unity to gnome-shell usability wise, but I think gnome-shell has the better under the hood implementation. Uses lots of javascript in css so its quite extensible and easy to change.
Unity is kind of convoluted in its implementation, its built as a compiz plugin (and compiz is already a complex beast in iteslf..), and in addition to that the unity interface is implemented with the NUX toolkit which is embedded on top of compiz and does lots of direct opengl stuff.
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I always wondered why they junked clutter, clutter seems to work great for me. Can't even find any info on NUX, how it works, why it was developed etc.
Are you a programmer at all?
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also here's a good post explaining what NUX is used for:
[link]
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Thanks for the link, great bit of info.
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I'm not really a programmer (I only know a bit of java and c++ atm), but I have followed the development of unity and gnome-shell since they first appeared.
Early on mutter had serious performance issues, and afiak thats why they decided to switch to compiz (compiz was also a more mature project at the time). B
ut now it seems like its the other way around, mutter/gnome-shell runs smooth as hell for me and compiz is quite noticeably slower (and less stable, I've never had mutter crash on me, but I've had quite a few stability issues with compiz since the 0.9.x series. 0.8.x was pretty stable for me)
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Do you know where is a blueprint/bug report about a switch to mutter, or do you think its very unlikely to do that?
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Ah mutter, yes, the widget library. I've been working with clutter directly since mutter at the time seemed to get in the way, see here: [link] but maybe I could go back to mutter and see what they've done since.
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This is all it'd take to make the Unity Launcher better. Not only would this function better but it looks ten times more professional and stylish.
Now you just need to have a go at the Panel and the Dash
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Some great ideas in here. Really like the 'scrollable' focus
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