Canonical Clarifies Ubuntu Phone State: Nothing Really Until Snap-Based Image Ready

[cynical]

i'm another one this a little frustating but I change last week to proposedRC channel and I have small upgrades of system every day and now I will wait unitll they rebase the system to snaps. the phone is faster than the android version, battery is better and I have what I need in the ota14

That may not be possible, depending on your phone. It's not really Canonical's fault that they have to rely on Android kernels; it's either closed drivers or no phone for the most part.

[FuturePilot]

If they went with Wayland instead of Mir they would need basically the same work to create a Wayland compositor as a display server.
Sure, they could reduce some design and architecture work as you doesn't need the re-usability, but a decent software would have that anyway.
The total rewrite of Unity in QT would also be needed anyway. The old Unity built as a Compiz plugin is not sustainable and should have died a long time ago.

Yep. It should have died immediately when Compiz was abandoned upstream. Now they're stuck with maintaining an entire desktop shell written on a pile of abandoned shit that has zero support.

[bregma]

Yep. It should have died immediately when Compiz was abandoned upstream. Now they're stuck with maintaining an entire desktop shell written on a pile of abandoned shit that has zero support.

Well, except Compiz was never abandoned upstream. It's still maintained and ships as the primary window manager on the world's most widely-used Linux distribution, Ubuntu, and the current version is available in distros like Debian, Arch, and Knoppix. The only thing that was abandoned was official Fedora packaging, which lets us know where you're coming from here.

That's not to say it's appropriate software for resource-constrained devices like a phone or your refrigerator.

[Cerberus]

That may not be possible, depending on your phone. It's not really Canonical's fault that they have to rely on Android kernels; it's either closed drivers or no phone for the most part.

I strongly believe Canonical needs to make an official statement about it describing very precisely why older devices cant get the snap based Ubuntu Touch, while I am one of those people who knew the risks of buying a device with very experimental OS and was ok with that, some people are bound to get pissed off, we can already see some of that on Ubuntu Phone mailing list, Canonical needs a technically detailed statement about that. While I understand the necessity of evolution they also need to understand a lot of people are going to be pissed off about their phones being abandoned less than 2 years after they were launched, it is a sensitive situation, their next phone needs to be very well thought out and with affordable price, disgruntled people are unlikely to buy an Ubuntu phone again unless it is REALLY tempting, like powerful hardware, HDMI connection and fully working Unity 8 convergence.

I used my E4.5 for 1.5 years before switching to an iPhone, now I find iPhone too restrictive even though it works perfectly, so I will sell it and buy an Android, but I will still give Canonical benefit of the doubt and buy a converged phone, but make things right this time, even staunch believers in the project like me wont be giving them a third chance, make it right, make it good and then SUPPORT it, Apple gives 5 years of software and hardware support for iPhones, Canonical needs to promise at least 3 years of software support, and that includes OS updates, NOT just security updates, for the devices that will come out, dumping devices after less than 2 years like it is currently happening will be unacceptable, even for technical reasons. People complain about bad update philosophy of Android phones ALL THE TIME, learn from it Canonical and plan accordingly.

[Cerberus]

Well, except Compiz was never abandoned upstream. It's still maintained and ships as the primary window manager on the world's most widely-used Linux distribution, Ubuntu, and the current version is available in distros like Debian, Arch, and Knoppix. The only thing that was abandoned was official Fedora packaging, which lets us know where you're coming from here.

That's not to say it's appropriate software for resource-constrained devices like a phone or your refrigerator.

Which is why I have high hopes for Unity 8 since it is written in QT and QML, stability of Mir on Nouveau drivers needs improving though as it is constantly freezing on Nouveau so I cant contribute to testing as I get hard lock ups very quickly after logging into Unity 8.

[FuturePilot]

Well, except Compiz was never abandoned upstream. It's still maintained and ships as the primary window manager on the world's most widely-used Linux distribution, Ubuntu, and the current version is available in distros like Debian, Arch, and Knoppix. The only thing that was abandoned was official Fedora packaging, which lets us know where you're coming from here.

That's not to say it's appropriate software for resource-constrained devices like a phone or your refrigerator.

No. The main developer has abandoned it.

In November 2012 Spilsbury announced that he left Canonical.^[24] A month later he wrote that he has no plans porting Compiz to Wayland, although he is "still as committed as ever to maintaining compiz in its current form."^[25] Half a year later, he stated that he had stopped working on the project in August 2013.^[26] Despite this, a small team continues to work on Compiz with version 0.9.13 being the focus of development as of November 2016.^[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz

Yes it's still packed and available in Ubuntu (and some others) but there's no active development on it aside from the Unity piece. Canonical has been pretty much keeping it on life support with glue and duct tape. I actually did not know Fedora dropped it because I don't use or like Fedora so that's irrelevant to my comment.