Comment 10 for bug 1055936

Having previously used Ubuntu 8.04 I later moved to Xubuntu 9.10 and currently Lubuntu 11.10. So I'm not really familiar with how the Unity experience has evolved over the past few releases. This comment is mostly about my first impressions on booting the Ubuntu 12.10 x86 CD in a VirtualBox VM.

The user experience is, to be frank, awful. It's almost unusably slow.

No accelerated graphics driver is loaded when the CD boots. The overall GUI experience is dog-slow, and that's with a ~2GHz Core 2 Duo. I imagine many potential users will try Ubuntu/Unity and be put off before even installing it. Not to mention users of ARM systems which have significantly slower CPUs and probably no accelerated graphics driver available even after installing...

13.04 is supposed to have an emphasis on efficiency, so I hope something can be done about the unaccelerated graphics experience by then. Probably many systems are unaccelerated when booting the CD, even if an accelerated driver might be available after installation. It gives a very poor impression to potential users.

I recently read about Enlightenment, and how it's supposed to be very efficient even with various "blingy" graphical effects. So I downloaded an Ubuntu-based distribution which uses it, Bodhi Linux (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux/).

I booted the Bodhi CD in VirtualBox and selected the Compositing profile. Once the desktop had loaded, there was a stark contrast between the fluidity of the GUI vs Ubuntu/Unity. Try opening several windows and Alt-Tabbing between them. Even with my system slowed to 800MHz that was pretty smooth.

Is there any possibility for a future version of Unity to build on or borrow ideas/code from Enlightenment? That could largely solve the problem. (Apparently Enlightenment does use accelerated graphics when available.)