Introduction

As of 2010-11-19, there 170 blueprints targeted to Natty. This page summarizes the Essential and High blueprints that represent product changes for Desktop, Server, and ARM Editions. This summary only includes Essential and High changes, and does not include changes delivered by teams such Dx, Ubuntu One, and others, but rather only the changes created or closely tracked by the Ubuntu Engineering Team and related community members.

Client

Unity

Users are going to get a new desktop shell, Unity. This experience will be simpler, faster, and more pleasing than any desktop they've encountered before. Furthermore, the Desktop and Netbook Edition will be combined into a single edition. Defaults suitable for small or large screens will be determined at install time. All of the essential applications that users love and use today will still work under Unity.

The Ubuntu Engineer team's work in this area does not include building the Unity Shell itself, that will come from the Dx team. The Ubuntu Engineering Team's work does include:

1. Integrating Unity into the desktop
2. Setting correct defaults at install time

2d Experience

For users who either lack the hardware to run Unity (3d hardware is required), or who still prefer the "classic" desktop, a non-accelerated desktop experience, dubbed the "2d Experience". This will be essentially comprised of a classic Gnome 2.3.x desktop, but of course with all of the Ayatana enhancements, such as indicators, and notify-osd. This will also include the global application menu, and perhaps other enhancements. It will lack the Unity Launcher, and Unity Places, however.

A key aspect of this work will be determining the hardware on which Unity will run. This will be determined through testing and community feedback.

Software Center

For users, the primary change to software center will be the addition of ratings and reviews. Users will be able to read reviews of software in the software-center before they install it, and will be able to rate and review software themselves as well.

The Canonical ISD team will be endeavoring to extend the current software center payment capabilities in order to add the ability for users to support open source software projects that are capable of accepting donations. This will require some work on the software center as well.

Finally, there may be some tweaks and improvements to the existing software center experience as time permits.

Testing

The Ubuntu Engineering QA team will be spearheading the creation of an automated desktop testing program for the purpose of quickly discovering regressions in integration of software on the desktop. During Natty this will focus on ensuring that applications continue to work properly in Unity.

Application Selection

As usual, the desktop team will stay abreast of the best that the current open source stack has to offer.

Misc.

Other important goals that will pursued are to continue our work around boot experience, in Natty striving to ensure that the boot experience is clean and without warnings or text on as much hardware as possible. In order to better support OEMs, there will be tweaks to the OEM Config tool, and the Kernel team will move to a 2 week SRU cadence into order to facilitate hardware enablment for OEM partners in a more predictable manner.

Server

The Server Team has three top level goals:

1. Be a great host
2. Be a great guest
3. Be great at common workloads

Common workloads may run in a guest, or may run on bare metal servers.

Host

Being a great host in Natty will focus on tightening up containers.

Guest

Guest images will see some tweaks based on user feedback, and will also see improvements to booting and initialization of guest images. Boot improvements should extend to bare metal servers as well.

Work Loads

The two essential work loads currently targets are for web scale, and clustering.

Misc.

Similar to the client, there will also be a focus on automated testing.

ARM

Aside from turning the crank on omap 3 and omap 4 images, the ARM team will invest in tools to make it more easy and fun for the Ubuntu on ARM developer community.