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Ubuntu Heads To Smartphones, and Tablets
First time accepted submitter GuerillaRadio writes "Mark Shuttleworth is to announce that Canonical will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL starting today. Shuttleworth said, 'This is a natural expansion of our idea as Ubuntu as Linux for human beings. As people have moved from desktop to new form factors for computing, it's important for us to reach out to our community on these platforms. So, we'll embrace the challenge of how to use Ubuntu on smartphones, tablets and smart-screens.'"
...since Unity has made Ubuntu completely suck on anything with a mouse and keyboard.
Having a tablet oriented linux distro is going to open up the linux market. Ubuntu has a reputation for working out of the box, let's see if they can keep it with such unusual hardware.
So we can look forward to the "year of Linux on the Tablet" just after the "year of Linux on the Desktop"?
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.
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They modified Linus? What did they do to him? I bet he's pretty angry about that!
Don't worry, it wasn't the real Linus, they forked him first.
Guns don't kill people! Admins do!
I thought it was just a half-assed imitation of OS X with the dock moved over to the left side and inconsistent application menus. Unlike Gnome3, it doesn't seem like something that would work on a tablet (nor anywhere else). I'd like a Gnome3 version of the Asus Eeee Pad Transformer.
Absolutely. Big mushy buttons, lots of clicks (or finger mashing) to get to anything not on the launch bar.
From what I've seen, ditto for Gnome 3. My first thought on getting that up was "this is made for a tablet".
I actually do work with my Linux box. I'm disinclined migrate to someone else's idea of how I ought to work with my computer, every six months.
The same way they "competed" with Vista on the desktop with the Walmart $200 Ubuntu PC. Too many returns. ... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu
The same way they "compete" with Amazon's cloud service (hint - they don't - they use Amazon's EC2 cloud service).
The same way they "compete" with Apple and Microsoft right now - oh wait - they can't even GIVE it away.
Ubuntu is shuttleworth-speak for "make a big announcement, then nothing much happens, then move on to the next Oh shiny!"
The TV and blu-ray manufacturers already have their own customized distros. Nobody's going to switch from Android to a distro that has a history of breaking something important on every update.
Canonical previously announced that their distro was being preloaded on three ASUS netbooks. That was in August. Didn't happen.
Canonical issued that Linux press release, but Asus never said they were going to ship those machines with Linux. Canonical has no credibility.
Can you dual boot a phone?
Yes. The basic way of installing Cyanogenmod (etc.) puts a recovery bootloader on your phone, such that you can select what OS to boot.
Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations. Unfortunately, with 11.10 and the upcoming move away from X11, Ubuntu is hell-bent on leaving that market: Unity is already nearly useless for power users (it doesn't work well at all on large or multi-screen setups), tools like Synaptic are becoming non-standard, etc.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS. Ubuntu has virtually no mobile developers. And if it manages against all odds to even get a small market share, Ubuntu will face the kind of patent feeding frenzy that Android is being subjected to.
Too bad Shuttleworth couldn't leave good enough alone. He's going to kill Ubuntu and seriously hurt Linux as a whole.
chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)
Please go easy on them - they obviously typed that using Unity.
This is a nitpick post, but Unity actually uses Gnome 3. You're probably thinking of Gnome Shell, which is the standard UI in Gnome 3.
I just deleted something a long rant from this post. Here's the TL;DR version:
Gnome Shell is a cool tech demo/alpha which shows a lot of promise and might become something great in a couple of year's time. It's so cool that I can't bring myself to dislike it as much as I probably should.
The lack of development for Gnome 2 made me switch to Windows 7. Since I'm not doing serious work in Ubuntu nowadays, I've stopped posting helpful advice and solutions at the Ubuntu forums. All things considered it's probably a net loss to the community and I don't know if future versions of Gnome Shell will make up for it. Keep in mind that Windows 8 and Mac OSX are moving targets and it's not clear that Gnome Shell will ever catch up.
Shuttleworth has not only disregarded the community's complaints about Unity, but now his blog is actively deleting and censoring any further criticism. Pleas for them to offer a desktop that actually looks and works like a desktop, if not as a replacement for Unity then at least an offering with an equal amount of support, are being treated with a "we know best, go away you silly peon" response. Sorry Mark, you are not Steve Jobs, you can't get away with that routine. Unity is a disaster, and when you have Linux luminaries like Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond switching their desktops to Xfce, you know you're heading in the wrong direction.
I myself have also made the switch to Xfce, and after doing so, and even after having been a loyal Ubuntu user for five years, I'm wondering what's the point of staying with Ubuntu at all if not for what used to be a gorgeous desktop. I did a little research and found that aside from the formerly gorgeous desktop, all of the things that I loved about Ubuntu were actually things about Debian. Now that Unity has replaced the good desktop, the only advantage Ubuntu has over Debian is a better installer.
Yes, Unity will probably be more at home on a device that has no keyboard and mouse, such as smartphones and tablets. But competing with Android (not to mention Apple) is going to be a tough sell there. So why are they blowing it all by alienating their existing installed base?
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Want to know what's REALLY funny about this announcement? Look at the intended release date - April 2014.
That's right - the same month that XP is being EOL'd, instead of releasing a Linux OS that can replace it and run legacy apps, they're going after a pie-in-the-sky mobile market that will be competing with the iPhone6, iPad4, and Win9Mobile.
Here you have a 30-month window of opportunity, a business community that would do a Bernanke and drop helicopter-loads of money on you if you can even half-way deliver, and nobody is going after it.
Who does Shuttleworth think he's fooling? In 2-1/2 years, there will be a billion smart devices running Android and iOS, and even a few running Win9Mobile. Somebody should buy him a black turtleneck so he can pretend his RDF is working.
Besides, anyone who really wants to run Linux just has to buy a r00table Android device. No need to wait 30 more months for Ubuntu.
This article should have read "Mark Shuttleworth continues his campaign to clone Apple products as closely as possible."
Sorry, but am I the only one who doesn't think we need another OSX-like operating system on a tablet? Ubuntu is ruining what Linux worked towards for years by trying to lure in users with pretty colors and big icons. That's not what Linux is about. We're not Apple users. We don't care about that shit. We want a system that works, and works efficiently. Cloning OSX is counter-productive to that goal, since it's certainly not the most productive operating system out there.
The dock is one of the worst task-management devices ever conceived. You have no information about how many windows of a particular application are open, nor what those individual windows are displaying. The single file menu bar along the top is an inefficient window design forcing you to completely switch windows before you can access the menu for a different application. A large icon-based application launcher results in more scrolling and digging for what you want to run as opposed to a basic cascading menu of categories. Window controls at the top left, and dialog buttons with the most important button on the right, are completely counter-intuitive to how people read and process information.
The entire design is taking us back 30 years to when the Mac OS first launched, when computers were hardly capable of running more than one application at a time. Microsoft nailed it and created the most productive desktop OS interface with Windows 95 onward. Apple, on the other hand, remained stagnant and has never changed its interface other than adding a dock. So why the heck is Shuttleworth trying to copy it? Ubuntu created a huge userbase, and finally gave Linux a single platform to rally around and focus development in a single direction, but now they're trying to shove a poorly developed interface onto everyone in the name of "innovation."
Yes I know you can simply switch back to Classic, but that doesn't automatically fix the other initial problems of backwards window controls or dialog buttons. It also doesn't change the fact that that's not what people are going to see and use by default. And the default is, quite frankly, a mess. Let's not teach people to use computers like this, before people start getting used to it.
Sharp released a small Ubuntu based tablet called the Netwalker years ago - I own both the tablet and pocket computer versions. They are both pocket sized, so not exactly comparable with "tablets" like the iPad. There are some input issues on the tablet because the input software (made by Motorola) is buggy but other than that I get significantly more functionality out of it than I do my Android phone - simply because it runs a lot of software that "should" only be on the desktop and it runs it just fine - and it's easy to just apt-get install whatever rather than digging through the market. On top of that I can compile whatever I want and run it right there, I don't need to statically package things in a big blob and export them.
Of course anyone who just read that and though "wow, that IS great!" should take a step back and realize the general tablet market doesn't do any of that.