Yikes! Fare thee well, Unity 2D

http://askubuntu.com/questions/134346/why-is-unity-2d-being-discontinued

And just when I was getting to know you.

 

meh!

i found the last Ubuntu sluggish on my 5 years old computer.
hopefully, it works much better on newer machines.

this last move will make it even harder for people with older machines.

 

It will be supported for 5 years on lts, so that's good enough for now.
Mrk

 

Unity 3D is snappy for me on a 2009 Dell 1545 laptop. But then I don't compare FPS or whatever. In other words, no heavy graphics. My formula- and macro-heavy spreadsheets open quickly in Calc. Even editing spreadsheets in Google Docs is a joy. I was trying out 2D to see if I could notice it being "lighter". Can't say I notice much. It's back to 3D tomorrow.

 

They are discontinuing unity-2d as a separate project. 2d support is planned be integrated with what is currently unity-3d.

 

On the one hand, this doesn't sound so great for users of low-spec computers. On the other hand, Unity 2D is itself pretty sluggish, and really only pays lip service to the idea of running Ubuntu on low-spec computers.

(FWIW: 12.04 with Unity 2D is slow as molasses on a Core 2 Duo workstation with 4 GB of RAM, which is not by any means what I'd call low-spec. The bloat is totally out of control.)

I'm really a bit disturbed by the way major desktop distros (and desktop environment projects) are abandoning all pretense of running on low-powered hardware. Maybe I'm being sentimental... But one of the big reasons I migrated to Linux in the first place was that it could run - not badly, either - on a Pentium II desktop with 192 MB of RAM. And through most of high school I was using a Powerspec desktop with 128 MB of RAM, which Linux also ran quite well on. Expecting anything to run with less than 256 MB would be a bit much these days, but I'm still quite disappointed to see this OS getting so porcine that it can't run properly with 4 GB and a Core 2 Duo. It strikes me as bending quite unnecessarily to the industry's desire for planned hardware obsolescence.

 

Both Unity 2 and 3D run quite snappily on my HP 2.0 ghz laptop with 4 gigs of ram. It does have an nvidia video card in it, though. I guess it depends upon your hardware as to how well Unity runs.

Later...

 

i found moving a windows fastly around was not as smooth as i'd like.
of course, i can't complain because i'm using a 5 years old computer.

but the graphic responsiveness is much better with Bodhi Linux, or Windows 7.