By Matthew Sacks

Unity is Canonical, maker of the Ubuntu Linux’s project, effort to create a graphically pleasing, user friendly, free graphical desktop. Unity was released originally in the 10.10 version of Ubuntu, and has made some significant improvements in the way we use Linux, and making it easy to use for everyone, not just Linux experts and enthusiasts. Ubuntu will be the default shell in Ubuntu 11.4 (Natty) and going forward. See the video below to see what Unity looks like:

Ted Gould, Developer for Desktop experience at Canonical, maker of the Ubuntu platform, will be in Los Angeles, California at the Southern California Linux Expo, giving a presentation on Unity. The title of his talk is “Unity: Why does it matter?“. I spoke a bit with Ted about the upcoming presentation, the importance of good user experience, and the upcoming Natty release.

Unity is exciting for a number of reasons.  It’s the landmark effort for involving design and user testing from the beginning of the development process all the way through.  It represents a new level of polish and usability for the Free Desktop.  But it’s also the first time that Ubuntu users have been asked to change the basic configuration of their desktops.  It’s a big ask.  We hope to delight them with the change.

Q: Even with recent improvements in Linux GUI’s many mainstream consumers are slow or reluctant to adopting Linux as their desktop of choice, could Unity be a game changer in this regard?

Ted Gould: It’s going to take a lot more than just Unity to bring Free Software the mainstream consumers, but we hope that it’s a big part of that.  Unity is a desktop shell, while it’s something that users interact with constantly it’s rarely their goal in using a computer.  I’ve never heard a user say “I want a new OS so that I can launch applications better.” In that regard Unity is more like a picture frame, and the applications are what really matter.

What we hope is that with Unity we can deliver a designed way for users to interact with their desktop along with appropriate hooks for applications to take advantage of that design.  As the shell looks and behaves better applications which choose not to raise to the same level of quality will stand out more, and hopefully be fixed so that we can increase the overall usability of Free Software and make it a great experience for people everywhere.

Q: How do they have to change their desktop configuration?

Ted Gould: The first thing that most users would notice is the colorful launcher that is on the left side of the screen.  It provides a fast way to launch your favorite applications and also is used to provide information on the running status of applications.  This is exciting for new users because it very quickly answers the question of “what can I do with this thing?” with a set of visually rich large icons.  This replaces the bottom panel which only communicated the state of open windows previously.
Other changes depend on how old your desktop configuration is as we’ve been moving to the indicator system over several releases, always with the goal of getting them into Unity (though we had no idea what it’d be like when we started).  We did know that we wanted to turn the top panel into less of a panel, and more of a menu bar.  This provides for a very comfortable exploration mode for users and some powerful ability scrub between system status entries.  Unity completes this for most users, but we’ve provided applets in the archive for a while that provided the same functionality if people wanted to custom configure their desktop.
We’ve also taken the opportunity to move the menus from individual windows and put them into the menu bar at the top of the screen.  This makes them more consistent to find, and also cleans up the individual windows significantly.  I think that many users will find this jarring at first (and I imagine there will be much discussion on the Internet about it) but in the end users will find it to be an overall polishing of the desktop experience.

See Ted’s talk at SCALE 9x

Find out more about Unity

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