About: Few Upcoming Major Features to the Unity Desktop Module

Mark Shuttleworth on his blog posted another interesting article that showed-off few of the major changes that are going to be integrated into the Unity desktop module with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 version. Now since it's introduction, Unity got caught up with a lot of "feedback". Although Canonical is certainly good at one thing, which as anyone can see, is planning (ahh! the "benefit" of a controlled "environment", kidding).

For instance, it's no secret that they've been thinking about the Unity desktop for sometime thus they slowly invented some of the major changes (although they seem "little") such as moving the buttons to the left side of the titles for instance which is a necessity within the Unity desktop module.

Although not everyone loved the locked application launcher that sits to your left and I still think that if they moved it to the bottom side of the screen would really help to preserve some of the screen since, especially most of the Laptops and Netbooks come with 16:9 screen ratios. For instance, a 10.1 inch Netbook after opening certain amount of applications would easily fill-up the launcher space thus after minimizing it one would require to "find" the appropriate icon on the application launcher.

Unity 2D in action...

But then again, as Mark said himself, Unity desktop is designed in a way that lets the users to do one thing at a time with less distractions. In that sense, it makes sense (kinda). Another thing that was criticized was the location of the "three musketeers" (also known as Close:Minimize:Maximize buttons :P).

After you maximize a window, the buttons are rendered around the upper left corner, right next to the Ubuntu Logo at the near beginning of the left side of the upper panel. Now some did not like it since not all the time that we use that Ubuntu Logo to manually launch our apps thus that space is wasted (every pixel counts, hey!).

So in some recent daily 11.10 images, some found out (I've never used the 11.10 alpha) that the buttons had finally move into that "space" but I think it was temporary, just for testing purposes, and I think you may not find it in the daily builds of the Alpha images.

Anyhow, as you can see with the below screenshot, Mark points out few interesting features actually. Although I won't be going into the details that much since I use Ubuntu 2D "thanks" to my ATI GPU that gives me a lot of headaches (crashing, etc) due to Compiz I think, but as you can see Unity 3D (including the 2D too) has gone some impressive changes, not just the little buttons dance :).

3 align looking buttons :), "Lenses", "Sources"... what are they?!...

Please read the full post from this page by Mark himself and give him some feedback (including angry ones too :D). Personally, with all the due respect to KDE developers, I'm a bit scared by the Qt integration in Ubuntu + many other philosophical differences that it carries, thus it may not be my primary desktop (who cares what you use Gayan! ... :) ).

Not because I find it difficult to handle (seriously, it's got issues! but...) I gotta admit, I actually like the Unity 2D module, although I ain't a hacker, but in a way, GNU/Linux is a part of my identity as with many of ya folks, thus I ask more from a desktop rather than it's been seen as a user friendly "tool" by the "usual users".