UBports Aiming For An Exciting 2021 With Ubuntu Touch
From the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 92 session various interesting bits of information were shared as far as their plans over the coming months for this community that continues to advance the Ubuntu Touch effort primarily for smartphones -- various Android devices and also the likes of the PinePhone.
Lomiri (the rebranded Unity 8 effort) on the desktop is slowly making progress in part through their cooperation with Manjaro developers. For now it's all bleeding edge and under heavy development. Ubuntu 20.04 packages for Lomiri are forthcoming.
The UBports installer continues to be improved upon and seeing many nice new features.
Qt 5.15 support for Ubuntu Touch won't be here for a while as first is the transition to Qt 5.12 with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Speaking of Ubuntu 20.04, UBTouch developers continue moving towards that as the long-awaited package base to succeed the aging Ubuntu 16.04. The developers are hoping in the first half of this year they will be able to finally begin the transition from 16.04 to 20.04 LTS as their base platform.
Ubuntu Touch currently continues relying on Mir 1.x. For helping to move to Mir 2.x with its refine architecture, a "Miroil" is being developed with upstream to fill in some missing gaps to get Qt Mir running on Mir 2.x. Eventually they will have Ubuntu Touch running nicely on Wayland.
When discussing possible user interface refinements, they are not pursuing anything to be "more like" Android or iOS and will likely continue relying on the design concepts spearheaded originally by Canonical but will likely continue to be refined and improved upon with time. They want to "build on that, not scrap it."
More details on the latest Ubuntu Touch work at UBports.com.
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