Unity 5.8 out, ready for beta2!
Par Didier Roche le vendredi, mars 23 2012, 17:30 - Lien permanent
As I write Unity 5.8 is currently building on our official builders and will reach ubuntu precise soon. For this release, a big part of the stack was uploaded (14 components) including unity, unity-2d, nux of course, but also compiz 0.9.7.2 and the lenses (with some ABI breaks in the middle).
What's new on this unity release? Well, you can see the 3d milestone and 2d bug fixes (look also at this one for unity 2d which landed last monday). Keep in mind also that some 3d bug fixes benefits 2d as well! So, a lot of bug unitfixes, but that's not only it! We also got some UI refinements, some very visible, some more hidden, but it's all those little touch which makes the whole experience better!
Do not forget as well that the music lens is now taking back an important role as it supports rhythmbox in addition to banshee!
Also, we won some multimonitors new capabilities in both 2d and 3d. Basically, you can now decide if you want sticky edges between your monitors or not[1], and decide if you want one launcher (which is then set on your primary monitor), or a launcher on each monitor. Gnome Control Center was patched to add those default options (which only appears on an unity session) back to the main experience. You will now notice as well a more "unityish" preview with a panel and a launcher displayed. Dragging the launcher also enables to change where you want to set it in addition to the combobox (think about clicking on apply to get the choice taken into account!).
We encountered some hiccups but we either fixed them or workarounded other issues for landing the new stack in beta2. We still have an annoying issue which seems to be appearing rarely (only on some configurations). This is logged as critical on this bug. If you encounter this latter, you should choose the unity-2d session for now on your logging screen. Well done to everyone involved on this release!
We are trying as well a new approach to avoid having the current development version of ubuntu uninstallable for a while (because of a long dependency chain in all the related unity components) while everything is building. Basically, we are using experimentally the -proposed pocket and once everything is built, it will be copied to the main archive. Thanks for the release team to push the right buttons to enable this, let's hope this experiment will be successful and that we can generalize it in Q for every unity release and other components (and not only when we are frozen)!
Hope you will enjoy this release and precise beta2, which is just around corner!
Note
[1] warning, still some work has to be done
Commentaires
Too bad there's no way to change monitor's refresh rate.
Will all this be tested and fixed in time for the release? I wonder.
Will sou finally simplify the window switching procedure of the two programs of the same kind through the launcher?
I mean when i come with the mouse ower the program icon in launcher the list of opened programs(or small thumbails like win 7) does not appear, but one must click on the icon to choose the instance. I consider that complicated especially with more than 4 windows when they become really small in the selection.
It is nice that you have simplified system setting menu for unexperienced users, but i think that you should also give the advanced setings menu switch, where user could configer the os how he likes it(whindow switching wit tab only on one screen etc.) whithouth running complicated procedures and downloading some other tweak utilities.
If you would fix the mentioned issues unity would be just fine for me .
\o/
Good job, team
@Sharky : +1
I think there is a big usability issue (I think it remains true in 12.04 ?)
Here is a very simple use case :
- I open thunderbird
- I write a new mail (so 2 thunderbird windows open)
- Now I want to drag & drop a file from Nautilus to attach it to the mail
- So I open Nautilus and select the file
- Now if I click on the Thunderbird icon, it raises both windows including the messages list window which usually takes the whole screen
- So I have to make both windows re-appear, then re-select the message window, then make the nautilus window reappear, then drag & drop.
There are many similar cases, I think it's pretty very annoying. This is my biggest complain about Unity, apart from that it's a pretty good job
About my comment number 5 :
actually it was a bad example as there is no problem here.
The issue is : it's frequently difficult to make actions where you have to go back and forth between some given windows, when there are several instances of the same app open, because, when you click on the icon dock, it raises all windows, hiding what you may have opened beforehand.
@ T_U: +1
@ Sharky: +1