Unity roadmap

[SPK201]

Hello,

is there any place where I can look at upcoming Unity features/changes or what's currently under development?

[GreatDanton]

Is this what you are looking for?
https://launchpad.net/unity

Regards.

[grahammechanical]

It is amazing what a google search on 'ubuntu unity' will come up with.

http://unity.ubuntu.com/

I doubt very much if anything in Ubuntu is fixed in stone in such a way as can be represented by a roadmap of some kind. And then you should read the October posts of Mark Shuttleworth's blog.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

Being too open about future intentions has led to uncalled for attacks on Ubuntu and its people. So, another approach is being tried:

Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate

So what will we be up to in the next six months? We have two short cycles before we’re into the LTS, and by then we want to have the phone, tablet and TV all lined up. So I think it’s time to look at the core of Ubuntu and review it through a mobile lens: let’s measure our core platform by mobile metrics, things like battery life, number of running processes, memory footprint, and polish the rough edges that we find when we do that. The tighter we can get the core, the better we will do on laptops and the cloud, too.

And then there is these comments from the start of the Quantal Quetzal development cycle:

From a styling point of view, we think in terms of quadruples: this next release starts a cycle of four, which will culminate in 14.04 LTS. So there’s an opportunity to refresh the look. That will kick off with a project on typography to make sure we are expressing ourselves with crystal clarity – making the most of Ubuntu’s Light and Medium font weights for a start. And a project on iconography, with the University of Reading, to refine the look of apps and interfaces throughout the platform. It’s amazing how quaint the early releases of Ubuntu look compared to the current style. And we’re only just getting started! In our artistic explorations we want to embrace tessellation as an expression of the part-digital, part-organic nature of Ubuntu. We love the way tessellated art expresses both the precision and reliability of our foundations, and the freedom and collaboration of a project driven by people making stuff for people.

Most of this effort will involve Unity.


Regards.

Update: I just remembered this:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/c...buntu-icon-set

New icon set designs coming.

[offgridguy]

Very interesting; thanks grahammechanical

[ELD]

Well the memory footprint should be a good thing to work on that won't just benefit mobile stuff hopefully, looking forward to performance improvements mostly.

[kaldor]

Well the memory footprint should be a good thing to work on that won't just benefit mobile stuff hopefully, looking forward to performance improvements mostly.

Indeed. Unity's performance compared to the competition is embarrassingly abysmal. I've given up trying to use it as my main desktop because I either boot into Windows or switch GNOME Fallback in order to be able to play games. Even KDE with desktop effects enabled is much faster than Unity.

Performance should be one of the top priorities. Thankfully, I assume that the mobile improvements will trickle into the desktop as well.

Just getting a bit tired of seeing Launchpad bugs about performance going unanswered/marked invalid

[ELD]

Well with Valve now pushing Ubuntu maybe performance will improve not just from hardware vendors but from within Canonical as well.