As an answer to someone asking whether Unity will require a working OpenGL stack to operate in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical would offer an optional, QT-based, "2D" implementation of Unity. Here is a video, too.
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Member since:2006-06-12
It is probably because it is faster to develop that they picked Qt here, it's the 5th time they rewrite the Netbook shell, 2 time in GTK, one in EFL because the GTK one was too heavy, then Unity-gtk and now Unity Qt. The EFL version existed because GTK was a massive fail for ARM (gnome mobile anyone?) and Qt exist because GTK was a massive fail for highly interactive and attractive interface without additional bloat. I think there is a pattern here and Cananocal start to understand that they are wasting effort with GTK.
Qt is far from perfect, it work well on lower power devices, but do that a while to load unless to work hard on speeding it up. The GTK unity is unusable on most first and second generation netbook (900mhz celeron and 1.6ghz atom), so is KDE Plasma (with both raster and X11 backend, one is too slow and the other full the cpu. I dont even mention dataengine taking the rest of the cpu for themselves), this unity-2d come to fill that hole in the lineup. It is in Qt simply because clutter would not work and GTK2 is not very good for interactive interface until it got something like QML (CSS and HTML ui help a lot too, but GTK is working on that, lets give them credit).
*Btw, before voting me down, the point I made above have been made in Canonical blog post/press release.
Member since:2009-06-20
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Member since:
2008-12-26
My guess is that this implementation will be the only implementation of Unity as time goes on. Once QSceneGraph goes mainstream, QML will benefit as much from GPU acceleration as Compiz, making the "normal" 3D unity redundant.
By the time Ubuntu goes Wayland, at the latest.