More Details On UBports' Plans For Unity, Mir & Anbox

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Details On UBports' Plans For Unity, Mir & Anbox

The UBports community are among those planning to fork the work on Unity 8 and they've already made ambitious plans like porting Unity 8 to Wayland. More details were revealed today...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UBports-April-15-Talk

[Steffo]

Should be renamed to Titanic. We all know how the maiden voyage will be the last.

Everytime someone takes the Qt bait and try to use it for something bigger than an app it will turn into a burning platform.

KDE, Nokia, Jolla and Canonical already learned this.

Unity 8 would be ready if Canonical would have used Wayland. There are reference implementations for years and Canonical wouldn't had to patch GTK, Qt and so on for supporting Mir.

[starshipeleven]

I should be renamed to TrollFail. We all know how I always post blatant bullshit.

Everytime someone takes the flame bait and try to answer it for something bigger than a post it will turn into a flamewar.

Most people on phoronix already learned this.

fixed.

[Luke_Wolf]

So, are these ubports guys ex-canonical employees or what's their story? I hadn't heard of them before canonical canned Unity/Mir and googling doesn't give me much of note other than that they were a team porting Ubuntu Touch to various platforms.

[Vistaus]

So that means my M10 will still be supported? Granted, I haven't used it in a while because the whole platform was so stagnated, but with UBports, I might fire it up again.

[Mez']

So that means my M10 will still be supported? Granted, I haven't used it in a while because the whole platform was so stagnated, but with UBports, I might fire it up again.

I eventually flashed it to Android after the announcement Ubuntu Touch was discontinued.

One year later, I can finally use it to its full potential, even if it doesn't please me to write this.

If UBports can bake something handy, I would be happy to try it out.

[uid313]

Do they have the resources to main the Gtk and Qt ports?
While at the same time still having resources to do all the other work?

I hope they can at least do some contributions to improve Anbox, because then that can be useful even if this Mir and Unity thing fail.
Seems rather silly going with Mir because its going to cost in maintenance resources, and nobody is ever going to use it except Unity, so probably makes more sense to port Unity to Wayland and just drop Mir.

[onicsis]

Nokia’s Jolla smartphone OS goes Chinese, becomes Sailfish and Google-free

Jolla has announced that the Chinese Sailfish OS project has reached a milestone in development with $250 million earmarked from its various partners for developing the Sailfish ecosystem in China. In less than six months China will have its own independent mobile operation system based on Sailfish OS.

Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio made the announcement as Chinese President Xi Jinping was visiting Finland.

Sailfish OS has its roots in Nokia’s MeeGo operating system and was set up by ex-Nokia staff. MeeGo itself was a project that came out of Nokia’s own Maemo OS on the N800 and N900 series tablets and then the Intel-led Moblin OS.

The Sailfish China consortium will develop Sailfish OS-based solutions for secure smartphones, the automotive industry, TV, IoT and smartwatches.

Saarnio said, “This is an excellent example of technological collaboration between Finland and China. I expect that many similar collaboration projects will follow. There has been many Chinese projects aiming to develop a mobile operating system, but they all have failed. It takes several years to develop an operating system, and it is much wiser to utilize existing technology, and license it.”

By 2022, Saarnio said he expects 10 to 20 countries have followed Russia’s and China’s example and are building their secure mobile communication based on Sailfish OS.

“Sailfish OS is ideal to be used in the whole one belt one road area,” he concluded.

Last November, Jolla announced that in Russia Sailfish OS had been certified as the only mobile operating system which has been officially accepted to be used in governmental and government controlled corporations’ upcoming mobile device projects.

The issue of a need for a powerful, open and secure mobile operating system away from the Google and Apple ecosystems has been a recurring theme especially amongst the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Jolla first announced the China Sailfish consortium along with official support for the Sony Xperia X as one of the first reference platforms for Sailfish taking advantage of Sony’s open platform.

[Xaero_Vincent]

I think things turned out how they should. Mir would have caused unnecessary fragmentation even if the two display server technologies are similar. Unity 7 for Xorg and Unity 8 for Wayland should live on as forks and ported to as many distributions as possible. Anbox is exciting as it appears similar to Chrome OS's new Android layer and it appears Google has no interest in opening that technology up to conventional Linux distributions nor even Chromium OS (last I checked).

[stikonas]

For those who want a good Easter laugh about the sad state of KDE/Wayland just look up that Kwin dude on G+. It is 2017 and Kwin cant do Wayland or CSD right.

On the other hand, it is 2017 and mutter can't do SSD right. All those non-gtk apps (like mpv, wesnoth) without any decoration at all.