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THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, “Venereal Vista,” based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

Unity is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Picture: Unity is made of arse [newstechnica.com].

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”

David Gerard