Shuttleworth: No default GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 10.10

Mark Shuttleworth engaged in a Q&A session as part of the post 10.04 Ubuntu Open Week and in his role as SABDFL, gave some broad indications of what to expect in future Ubuntu releases. One question was whether the GNOME Shell, the proposed desktop environment of GNOME 3.0, would be default in Ubuntu 10.10. Shuttleworth said no, as the current release schedule puts it "out of bounds for Maverick" but it will be included in the Ubuntu universe repositories. He did encourage users to try it, "The more folks use it and think about it, the better our decisions will be for 11.04" he said, referring to the April 2011 Ubuntu release that's due after Maverick Meerkat.

Because he wants a singular user experience, Shuttleworth is also not considering the proposal to make application defaults configurable at installation. "One of the really strong values we have is that two users of Ubuntu should, by default, either be having the same experience, or be expert enough to understand why they are not". He sees benefits in the common user experience allowing users to help each other more easily; "They can help each other, just talking about "the browser'" ... "for the beginning, out of the box experience, we benefit a lot from keeping it tight".

Another subject touched on was the plan for "Windicators" (the window control buttons having been moved to the left on Ubuntu 10.04) beyond GNOME. "It will be simple to straightforward to add to KWin if the maintainers see fit and we'd likely add it in Kubuntu" said Shuttleworth. Other issues that came up were Blu-ray playback support (not possible in the free distribution because it needs proprietary software), Ubuntu Moblin Remix (it has been dropped) and RGBA transparency support (expected to be enabled soon).

(djwm)