Canonical has unveiled its revamped interface for netbooks, with the company looking to trample on Google's Chrome OS.
Ubuntu Project founder Mark Shuttleworth claimed the Unity UI had been designed from the ground up to make better use of screen space, be more touch friendly and consume fewer resources than the traditional Gnome desktop environment.
Indeed, it appears Shuttleworth shares the same ambitions for Unity that Google does with Chrome OS. "Instant-on products are generally used in a stateless fashion," Shuttleworth wrote on his blog. "These are 'get me to the web asap' environments, with no need of heavy local file management."
"They are also not environments where people would naturally expect to use a wide range of applications: the web is the key, and there may be a few complementary capabilities like media playback, messaging, games, and the ability to connect to local devices like printers and cameras and pluggable media," he said.
The result of these efforts is the Unity user interface, which replaces the taskbar with a vertical dock on the left-hand side of the screen, that can be scrolled up and down to access applications.
Icons have been enlarged to make them more finger friendly, and new "windicators" - icon-based widgets - will appear in the top panel showing the state of running applications, including updates and current activity.
Unity will appear on two versions of the operating system, including the existing Netbook Edition and a new OS called Ubuntu Light.
The latter is aimed at instant-on devices and will offer users a speedy, locked down path onto the internet. Canonical intends to work with OEMs to create versions of Ubuntu Light specially for their hardware and users will not be able to download it independently.
In contrast, the Netbook Edition will have the ability to add and remove programs, and include a file manager, bringing it closer to a fully fledged operating system.
