unity-dev team mailing list archive

["Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper" <vr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Philipp Gassmann <phiphi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 07.02.2012 21:04, Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper wrote:
> > I guess my first question is how can we programmatically disable
> > Ubuntu Unity mode (specifically disable the application menu
> > relocating, window titlebar integration with the top panel bar, and
> > disable the left side dock/launcher bar) for our users when they want
> > to enter VMware Unity mode with an Ubuntu 12.04 VM? Is it possible to
> > do so via gconftool or dconf-tool or something else?
> >
> > Is it possible to do this currently? Was Ubuntu Unity designed with
> > the thought that users might want to turn off elements of it without
> > having to logout and login again?
> >
> When I read your goal and your approach, I thought: "why not a different
> approach?"
>
> Wouldn't it be possible to access the exported menus and build them on
> the host system?
> With unity --replace you can restart the entire shell on the fly.
> Perhaps you could use a special compiz-plugin or similar that passes
> window content and menus to vmware.
> Could you even use unity-core (base of unity 3d and 2d) and make another
> frontend? Is there some kind of API between core and frontend?
>
> Disclaimer: I am no Ubuntu developer and don't know if that's possible.
> But I imagine you could result in even better integration.
>
>
Hey Philipp! Thanks for the reply! I'm CC'ing unity-dev too because I think
you have an interesting proposal and I'm guessing someone else might have
the same idea and I want to make sure I address it for them too. =:)

Actually, we've thought about your approach before. You're right, it would
be a possibility to host the Ubuntu Unity DE window menus in the host
system. But I don't think this would work across the largest segment of our
user base. I think it would be possible to do this with a Linux Ubuntu
Unity DE host and a Mac OS X host, since both of these host environments
have menus at the top of the screen and not in the application windows
directly. But we need to take into account all of our users, and I do not
think this solution would work at all for the majority of our users who use
Windows hosts and even our Linux users who don't use the Ubuntu Unity DE.
They're used to seeing application menus as part of the application windows
themselves and having them not show up there would be very foreign and
confusing to them.

So while I think it would be a pretty interesting design and would provide
for a nice integration on Mac OS X and Linux Ubuntu Unity DE host
platforms, we'd still need to design a different approach for the majority
of our users, sadly.

Good point, though! I definitely appreciate the "let's think outside the
box" approach. =:)

-- 
 -[ Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper   //  http://movingparts.net ]-
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