Unity 2D looks better than 3D version because it is using Qt

[Nyan Cat]

Actually Unity 2D looks 100 times better than 3D version using nux and gtk3.
Why?

Because Unity 2D use Qt so have animations, better effects, it is faster and looks better.
Unity 2D and 3D should be merged.
So, Unity 2D should have optional compiz integration based on that is it OpenGL avaible.
Qt has kinetic and smooth scrooling, something that gtk3 and nux does not have. So it is better for touch devices.
Even scroolobars look better in Unity 2D.

Gtk is not the future. Qt is the future.
So, Unity 3D should use Qt.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

thanks for the bug report, there are no such plans so i am closing this bug.

[Nyan Cat (nyancat)]

So maybe add some plans for that...?

[Sam Spilsbury (smspillaz)]

> Because Unity 2D use Qt so have animations, better effects, it is faster and looks better.
> Unity 2D and 3D should be merged.

Those are very grand assumptions ;-) The reason we're not using Qt for the 3D version is because there is no way to run Qt's GL scenegraph inside of the window manager which is required for some of the more complex effects that we do (for example, window thumbnails inside the alt-tab, or real-time blurring inside of compiz)

Granted, it is possible to separate those out into separate processes, but it would be a lot slower and synchronization would be a real issue. Unless we were to rewrite compiz to use Qt (which is *not* happening because Qt's scene graph is not optimized for the compiz case)

Additionally, one needs to consider the case that Unity is not just a "regular application". Qt provides us a certain level of toolkit support for what we want to do, but in order to provide a totally integrated experience you need to have a toolkit that is capable of running embedded in another process and also a toolkit that the Unity engineers are able to tweak and optimize for the Unity usecase itself. If there was ever a limitation in Qt, it would mean that we'd need to fix it in the upstream toolkit, and if upstream did not accept our patches to do so because it would be at odds with their vision for the toolkit then there would be a real problem where we would have to either compromise a widely used toolkit for the Unity case or compromise Unity to fit the toolkit. Indeed, this was a very large problem with Clutter.

[Nyan Cat (nyancat)]

OK, but what about smooth and kinetic scrooling? Works only in Unity 2D and no other programs in Ubuntu :(

[Nyan Cat (nyancat)]

It is very important for touch devices.