[microtonal]

Note that Unity 2D is based on Qt and also works pretty well these days. It seems that they have spread the risks somewhat.

I do thing the general developments in the ecosystem are somewhat worrying. Nokia's involvement in Qt is becoming more clouded, and everyone is distracted by tablets and smartphones (and naturally, the money streams go into those directions).

That said, that's also an opportunity for more consolidation, so if Canonical play their cards right, the open source desktop may become more single minded and effective.

[Mr_T_]

Unity 2D is deprecated: http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u...

"Since Unity 2D was depreciated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D"

http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u...

"Continued progress removing Qt and replacing with Nux"

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5O... "Unity 2D To Go Away In Ubuntu 12.10"

[reirob]

When Unity 2D will not be available, does it mean that Ubuntu will NOT run as a VirtualBox guest? I recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 in VirtualBox - mostly for development. I start to like Unity. But Ubuntu 12.04 is much slower than 10.04, in terms of GUI and responsiveness.

So what are Ubuntu's plans for GUI performance?

[Mr_T_]

I guess they will do the same as Gnome Shell and use LLVMpipe

[reirob]

Many thanks for this hint. I never heard about LLVMpipe before and looked up what it means. The article that I found about is here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...

What I find interesting in this article is the following:

"[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]"

"[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"