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First Unity was developed for Netbooks. But the Netbook Market is shrinking. Unity is not specialized for tablet pcs like Android 3, but it may work well with some specialized Apps for those devices.

Unity is still nice for Notebooks with small displays, but there is no big advantage on the desktop compared with other desktop environments like Gnome 2/3 or KDE.

So what's the point?

My first suggenstion was a hybrid between tablet pc and a desktop, for example for a manager. He can plug the tablet in a docking station in his office and he can work at a normal desktop, whats not possible with iOS or Android.

If he is in a meeting he can use it as a tablet to make notes, for example. Or if he is somewhere else outside the office or the company.

Same for normal users. They can dock the tablet and use it like a normal desktop pc or they can lie on the couch and browse in the web, read a book or chat with friend.

So, thats my suggestion. But what is the real plan for Unity or Ubuntu in general? I'm curious ;)

Bruno Pereira
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burli
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    Is the netbook market really shrinking? Could you prove that with some data? – Ingo Feb 18 '11 at 13:54
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    I currently have ony german news, for example http://tinyurl.com/6g7ej9h The IDC says 18% less in 2011. It's still a big market, but 18% is a number – burli Feb 18 '11 at 14:54

2 Answers2

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Unity is still nice for Notebooks with small displays, but there is no big advantage on the desktop compared with other desktop environments like Gnome 2/3 or KDE.

Unity is still GNOME. Uses Gnome technologies under the hood. The user interface is different. Right now we have gnome-panel as user shell which is getting deprecated.

So, thats my suggestion. But what is the real plan for Unity or Ubuntu in general? I'm curious ;)

From what I heard, they want to experiment and come up with a great user-shell for having a great user-experience. As of writing this, the experience with Unity is not top-class, but it is improving day by day.

Unity has a concept of Dash which is better explained by the screenshot below Unity Dash

If you are confused what various terms are used for defining various parts, then you can find it here on this AskUbuntu question

My first suggenstion was a hybrid between tablet pc and a desktop, for example for a manager. He can plug the tablet in a docking station in his office and he can work at a normal desktop,

Why isn't that possible. The bigger thing is that - It lies with hardware manufacturers to have such a thing. Just like you have a Touchpad on laptop but you can connect external mouse when you put it on your desk.

Similarly, you can have Ubuntu/Unity tablet(touchscreen) which you can dock at your workplace, plug in a keyboard and start using it. If you plug in a mouse, a pointer should appear, when you unplug, the pointer should disappear.

Community
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Manish Sinha
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  • Thx for your Answer. I'm not confuded about Unity. I use 10.10 since a few month on my Laptop and I follow the evolution of Natty since the first installable developer version. I know that Unity is based on Gnome, that 10.10 uses Mutter and 11.04 goes back to Compiz and so on. What me confuses is, what's the plan for the future? Will I see tablets with Unity in the next month? There are rumors about a tablet with 10.10 from China – burli Feb 18 '11 at 13:10
  • Well that answer can be given better by Canonical OEM lead. – Manish Sinha Feb 18 '11 at 17:53
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The real plan is to have Unity be Ubuntu's default interface for desktops, netbooks and tablets. You will most likely see tablets sold with Ubuntu in the near future. When defining tablets we must specify that there are two architectures that are usually used. The Tablet PC which has a x86_64/i686 processor and the iPad-like tablets which utilize ARM processors.

For the former there are already models that work well: To take an example from one of my friends, the HP Elitebook 2470p (hp.com) works by default (out of the box) with Ubuntu.

For the latter, the following article outlines the current efforts to create an interface for the Ubuntu ARM port. This interface looks different from the Unity interface. My guess is the ARM interface and theming will be unique to each manufacturer's vision. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7970264054.html

Mateo
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komputes
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  • The article is one year old and describes the old netbook launcher. This is not Unity. And the Elitebook is nice, but expensive – burli Feb 23 '11 at 22:52