What Do You Hope For Ubuntu Phone In 2017? Fed Up User Announces "Ubuntu Crickets"

[Fixnix]

I was a Ubuntu Desktop user until recently have been from the free CDs in bulk days.. sadly Canonical over the years has lost the plot and it is the harsh truth..The current desktop has become garbage and stale and also has practically remained stagnant with only the names and numbers changing. There has been ZERO innovation from canonical on the desktop distribution front the thing that got them famous in the first place. Ubuntu touch is already dead and Mr. Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical need to accept this hard hitting fact.. not a single famous android application developer finds the platform interesting for porting their applications. They should follow the footsteps of Firefox who shut down the Gecko on Phone project to concentrate on their main offering the browser experience. There was a time when Ubuntu had showcased Android apps running on Desktop.. sending SMS, Replying from the desktop.. That felt like true convergence between android and linux.. I hope they go back to getting something like that to work and improving their desktop.

Till then its good bye to Ubuntu and Canonical..! Fedora with Plasma 5 is my new innovative home.

[cynical]

I think the frustration with Ubuntu phone is everything wrong is stuff people were talking about since Ubuntu phone was started. Canonical forgot about the community and they forgot about Unity7 being stagnant in the time they are developing the phone for less users than even the desktop. If they were really offering an alternative they really could have really offered something on the desktop that people who don't have the phone can play with and contribute to the thing.

This doesn't even make sense as a criticism. Unity 7 has no option other than to remain stagnant, because it's built with hacked Gnome components and is implemented as a Compiz plugin. It's actually pretty great for what it is, but it's not any sort of foundation for a future desktop. So you are criticizing them for focusing so much on the 'phone' part, but they would have to do exactly what they are doing for the phone on the desktop as well. The only reason they started on the phone side is because.... obviously phone interfaces are simpler than desktops and you can actually put out something early that you can build on later. The actual phone specific bits are tiny relative to the stuff they are working on. Mir is not 'phone-related' (even if they didn't use Mir, they would need a Wayland compositor), Snappy is not 'phone-related', their SDK is not 'phone-related', scopes are not 'phone-related', etc.

What are they working on now that is specifically for the phone and not applicable to the desktop, that you find to be so abhorrent? You can complain that they are working too slowly, or that their convergence goals are too ambitious, but as far as I can tell, they are doing everything that they have to in order to build a next generation desktop environment. You can even see the beginnings of the new launcher for Unity, which is a desktop feature that is irrelevant on phones since they are using scopes.

By the way, you can play with and contribute to Unity 8. Anyone on 16.04 or 16.10 or 17.04 can install and use Unity 8. (barring driver incompatibility)

[Fixnix]

This doesn't even make sense as a criticism. Unity 7 has no option other than to remain stagnant, because it's built with hacked Gnome components and is implemented as a Compiz plugin. It's actually pretty great for what it is, but it's not any sort of foundation for a future desktop. So you are criticizing them for focusing so much on the 'phone' part, but they would have to do exactly what they are doing for the phone on the desktop as well. The only reason they started on the phone side is because.... obviously phone interfaces are simpler than desktops and you can actually put out something early that you can build on later. The actual phone specific bits are tiny relative to the stuff they are working on. Mir is not 'phone-related' (even if they didn't use Mir, they would need a Wayland compositor), Snappy is not 'phone-related', their SDK is not 'phone-related', scopes are not 'phone-related', etc.

Unity 7 was a mess in the first place, Canonical trying to be Apple II by taking on Gnome just because some patch was rejected which could probably be revised or launched as different shell like example: "Cinnamon". Phone Interfaces might be simpler but wasting their time with MIR which was not needed would have probably cut their time in half had they gone with WAYLAND and if probably it would have led to Canonical contributing back to the Upstream community, and if you say Wayland wouldn't be the right way to go ..please go check out "Plasma Mobile". It seems to be doing a fantastic job with Wayland without wasting development time on a whole new display server. SNAPPY is not phone related yeah but originally it wasn't Desktop related either.. it was to supplement their Server Offerings which they bought to the desktop later and please download the SDK which is 100% phone related (Basically is Qt Creator with Ubuntu Phone Templates and Libs). Again if Canonical wanted to create a new Desktop Environment around QT they could have simply forked KDE / Plasma and given it its own look and feel rather than wasting time reinventing the same wheel again and again. Instead could have focused on bringing new features to the desktop platform such as ARC++ support for android apps, Nvidia Optimus support with Wayland and GPU Context menus what Fedora guys are doing already, Improving the audio stack, Innovating of desktop applications and polish.

So its not that their convergence goals are too ambitious, it's simply that their are stuck reinventing a wheel that's already surpassed them and probably will continue to do so to a greater extent as Canonical keeps screwing up their desktop offerings to take on the mobile segment which has already failed to impress.

[rick60]

Canonical need to go ahead on the convergence approach and have at least two new general available devices for 2017. The first one could be an Intel Atom tablet or a 2in1 dev (tablet+notebook). Regarding a second phone device the situation is more complicated for the driver problems and the duopoly situation (Android and iOS market power). But EU has opened an antitrust procedure against Android so a general need to break the duopoly exists. Canonical could also propose Ubuntu Touch as a more ethical ecosystem regarding personal data treatment than Android targeting a niche of potential users that care about privacy adding that niche at the niche of Ubuntu fans thay already have. In any case they seem to have ideas about a "personal" delivery after the last OTA-14 of Ubuntu Touch. Let'see.

P.S. I am a user of the Aquaris tablet and after the last OTA I am quite happy of it. I use it especially for web navigation, youtube and to learn python using the interpreter from the console. So for me is a pity that now that the tablet is more usable then it was at the launch it is at the moment not available for purchase.

[shanefagan]

This doesn't even make sense as a criticism. Unity 7 has no option other than to remain stagnant, because it's built with hacked Gnome components and is implemented as a Compiz plugin. It's actually pretty great for what it is, but it's not any sort of foundation for a future desktop. So you are criticizing them for focusing so much on the 'phone' part, but they would have to do exactly what they are doing for the phone on the desktop as well. The only reason they started on the phone side is because.... obviously phone interfaces are simpler than desktops and you can actually put out something early that you can build on later. The actual phone specific bits are tiny relative to the stuff they are working on. Mir is not 'phone-related' (even if they didn't use Mir, they would need a Wayland compositor), Snappy is not 'phone-related', their SDK is not 'phone-related', scopes are not 'phone-related', etc.

Well I meant they could have very easily done a measure to unify quicker and drop Unity7 quicker. What I suggested personally was they release Unity8 with Compiz or Metacity or what ever really and have something working that users can develop along with Canonical. Unity8 up until recently was made with QML you could script it directly and change things on the fly since QML is a scripting language. The only thing they specifically are waiting on is Mir, everything else could have been released years ago on the desktop. Although it would have take 1 release to iron out the differences with Unity7 it still would have been worth it to not be supporting Unity7 anymore and being able to focus directly on Unity8 for both the desktop and the phone.

[cynical]

Well I meant they could have very easily done a measure to unify quicker and drop Unity7 quicker. What I suggested personally was they release Unity8 with Compiz or Metacity or what ever really and have something working that users can develop along with Canonical. Unity8 up until recently was made with QML you could script it directly and change things on the fly since QML is a scripting language. The only thing they specifically are waiting on is Mir, everything else could have been released years ago on the desktop. Although it would have take 1 release to iron out the differences with Unity7 it still would have been worth it to not be supporting Unity7 anymore and being able to focus directly on Unity8 for both the desktop and the phone.

If they could build Unity 8 using Compiz, that's exactly what they would do. They are going to QML/Mir because there is no other choice if they want to make a modern desktop. Making something based on Xorg is a complete dead end. Yes it would be done faster, but then it wouldn't be any different from Unity 7 so there is no point.