Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu 12.10 Plans, Netflix & What He Thinks of Windows 8

He’s the founder of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical, and is the creative force behind not on the Unity desktop but its expansion to new form factors.

So he’s a very busy man. But every six months Mark Shuttleworth sets aside 1 hour to answer questions from the community.

And today was the first chance many have had to ask Mark questions about upcoming changes, plans and more following the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The most interesting questions asked during the session are pasted below (with some some tidying up by me for a more pleasurable reading experience.)

The full – and unedited – log for the talk can be found online @ irclogs.ubuntu.com.

How close is Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 to your initial vision in 12.04? 2/3 complete? 3/4 complete?

2/3 is pretty close, for the desktop, yes. Of course, it’s a moving target.

Will 12.10 see a new icon theme introduced?

We’ve wanted to do a new icon theme for years! It’s not hard to start drawing… But yet another icon theme, without a proper analysis of the framework that we use icons in would not make the world much better so we’ve pulled together some experts, both artists and interface gurus to look at the use of icons across the desktop.

We’ll start with proper analysis. The art part will come later.

Where is the Dash search going? Will the Dash find exif, ID3 tags in the future?

Dash wants to read your mind, as does the HUD.

So the answer is “whatever fits your brain best”, and these will be fun conversations at UDS next week

I don’t have a fixed, detailed, secret roadmap for that [but] the framework enables you to plug in any sort of result set you like so, it’s something to invite collaboration and inspire innovation lenses and scopes are a lot of fun to work with.


Läs hela intervjun.