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Ubuntu Touch Developers Aim for Daily Phone Usability Before June
colinneagle writes with the latest Ubuntu Touch news. From the article: "The team behind Ubuntu Touch (aka 'Ubuntu for Phones') have committed to pushing forward to a ready-to-use version of the OS, one that the group will use to 'eat their own dog food,' by the end of May. What that means: Over the next few weeks, the team behind Ubuntu Touch is going to be attempting to implement enough functionality to make it possible to use Ubuntu on your phone (such as the Nexus 4) on a day-to-day basis. At which point their development team will be doing exactly that."
The developers are aiming just to have basic functionality working by the end of the month: calls, sms, data over wifi and cellular, a working address book, and preservation of user data across OS flashes.
Seems like it would be better to report results rather than intentions
or as soon as it compiles
Why in all that is holy would I put something like this on my expensive phone that I rely on for my income? I wouldn't even put it on my old phone out of curiosity.
I think there's a big question of, "Why?" Is Ubuntu worried about becoming obsolete? Do they believe in the Microsoft motto of, "one UI everywhere?" What is their motivating factor? It's definitely not a response to demand, because people aren't exactly lining up to put this thing on their phone.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I give Ubuntu five years before Microsoft pumps and dumps them.
They failed to take any reasonable market share with Ubuntu on the desktop, so they're trying mobile while at the same time making stupid decisions that ruin their desktop-focused distro even further. Shuttleworth should just give up and leave Linux to its niche, rather than ruin the direction it's taking.
There's nothing wrong with Linux remaining in its niche of geeky and nerdy users. It's worked out well so far.
The thing that keeps me from being excited about even the idea of this is that there *is* an open Linux-based environment for phones, and it's called Android. Google runs the development and has a closed license on apps like Maps, Chrome, etc., but, again, there *is* an open Linux-based environment for phones.
There are plenty of places Ubuntu could add value. They could build an alternative to the non-open 'with Google' ecosystem--imagine if Cyanogen were developed with the backing of a larger group like Canonical. They could reinvent some bits of UI like the launcher/keyboard/task switcher. (Amazon hacked up their own ecosystem and UI, just with a buy-from-Amazon focus rather than an open-source focus.) They could do some crazy difficult engineering to get desktop Linux apps running alongside Android .apk's.
Whatever they do, reinventing the foundations of Android isn't where the juice is.
So what if it is 'usable' if there is nothing to run on it!
So millions of 'not zealots' discovered the hard way how much they hated Unity on the desktop and Canonical missed the most important opportunity (in 10 years) for Linux on the desktop by rolling out an entirely new desktop paradigm at exactly the same time as Windows Hate was being forcefed to consumers. Windows is now backtracking, Canonical is slogging ahead. "We can do it! If we test it enough, we'll get it right!".
Nobody except zealots cares what's running on their phone, they care that it works. So the only people who will bother flashing their phones across to another OS (apart from whatever it came with) are people who tinker with their toys. Some of those tinkerers are tinkering with Android and now (at some un-named time in the future) some of those tinkerers will start to tinker with Ubuntu. And some (unknown) time after that, Ubuntu might actually manage to get a handset onto the market with a stable, working, feature filled operating system on it. And until that time, the Ubuntu developers are playing catch up trying to keep up with the likes of Google (for those not in the know, Google has multitudes of business units and huge influence on the interwebs) and Apple (apparently recently judged only the second richest corporation in the world).
Call me pessimistic, but does it even matter anymore what the Ubuntu developers are doing? Does a Ubuntu mobile phone have any future, and for that matter, does Ubuntu Linux or Canonical?
If Ubuntu touch is anything like the desktop version of Ubuntu, then I can expect:
* Daily update nags
* Several hours of reconfiguring software after each update
* Changes to the user interface that you didn't ask for
* Loss of previous functionality after each update
Ubuntu was my first Linux, and it was great for a time, but they just play too fast-and-loose with new software. They've unapologetically wasted many hours of my time on many fronts - I still have nightmares from when they switched me to unity without my consent. Seriously, if I wanted OSX, I would just go and buy a mac. I fear for these poor phone users in advance!
To what degree will they have to rely on binary blobs and nonfree software? I look forward to the day you can use free software on a handset but given Ubuntu's lax attitude I imagine this will only be a stepping stone.
Imho - and for the vast majority of the general public - implementing day-to-day functionality is the least of Ubuntu Touch's problems.
Some of what they've done is quite 'clever', and in some ways quite pretty, the UX exhibits massive, massive flaws. Mainly, *everything* is hidden behind [unsignposted] gestures, and most of the gestures are overloaded.
When you give the device to a room full of *developers*, and half of them give up in just turning on and unlocking the device, you know you've got serious problems.
Ubuntu is a opensource software,seems to be popular with many users,based with linux,will it stable in touch phone. I've no idea will this phone has a market,does people change their iphones to ubuntu? Nowadays,touch phones are made of polycarbonate sheets,i think that would be safer then other materials.
How is porting Unity to Qt proceeding? Because in its current state Unity is such a horribly slow piece of shit that it won't give a good experience on mobile. Try it on an Atom netbook and experience the pain. On a similar machine, most basic functions of Windows are fluid and just fine.
I don't buy an android tablet because I want to be able to run my stuff on it without needing a separate "app". I don't like having to learn a new interface because the device is slightly different.
And now you see what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8. It made the desktop version's Start Menu look like the tablet UI so that users of Windows RT and Windows Phone wouldn't have to learn a new interface for a different form factor.
Will I have more control over data mining than I have on my android "spy phone"?
"Wait. Other Linux developers don't eat their own dogfood?" That's right.
Hubris much?
You do realise that a large percentage of open source projects are started with the intention of filling a need that is currently not satisified by other software? (Novel concept, I know!). And therefore, there is an imperative to "dogfood" as soon as possible.
Granted, those open source projects weren't led by an asshole dictator with a commercial imperative. And hey, I've been unfortunate enough to try Unity. Given that precedent for "usability", dog-fooding in this case may well be a painful process
Take a longer perspective. Is Android really good or is it good enough? Because when I look at Android, I think "yeah, that's .. ok. I can handle that." But another part of my mind says "This piece of shit is just as much of a piece of shit as Apple's piece of shit." Thirty years from now, you're not going to give a flying fuck who was 5 years ahead or behind, back in 2013; you'll just be glad you're not using the infantile crap people had to settle for, back around then. None of the current mobile OSes are mature in the same way that we think of desktop's (relative!) maturity. None of them.
Disagree? Ok, consider this: BY DEFAULT for every Android phone you can get right now, when you make a phone call to someone you know, it's unencrypted. Think about how fucking absurd that is. You can fit many gigabytes of OTP into something the size of a fingernail for $10, your phone is in the same room as your wife's for several hours per day, and your phone calls to her are unencrypted.
I know, you think I'm writing this in 1975 to make fun of how sad it is, that our comm tech is lagging behind what Claude Shannon coudl have told you back in the 1940s, but no: this is 2013 I'm talking about. It's not just just a few years of tech lag that I'm talking about: we're getting to where it's the better half of a century. Back when the eggheads solved this problem, people didn't have transitor radios yet. A few decades later the tech guys came out with all the parts, waiting for the software guys to use it. A few decade after that, here we are, still saying "maybe some day."
This is one issue among many, in a world of phone tech which is really just barely getting started. Every single phone out there might seem like a serious product at first glance, but they all start to sniff of being some kind of marketing research prototype toy after you use 'em for a little while. They're cool but suck too.
Don't tell me Android is anywhere near to being half "finished." It's maybe 20% finished, just like iOS. It is so not too late for competitors. We need more, a lot more, because it looks like things are sort of already stagnating before they get close to being anywhere near done. All our phones are sorry little disgraceful pieces of shit that no computer enthusiast should ever want to be seen using.. and yet, it's all we have!! That's sad, really sad and competition might be the only hope things will ever get better.
You want an encrypted phone? Nothing is stopping you. Android happily lets you replace the dialer with your own. Hell, millions do it already. Just most people value price, call quality and having someone to call over encryption. How is Ubuntu going to improve on this?
Don't tell me about being stuck in the past and then try to claim that Ubuntu is better. A Linux system today would be very recognizable to someone from the 80s. You want earth shattering ideas you don't look toward desktop Linux.
When I said unfinished I mean that it feels like an alpha release. As in it has plain and obvious bugs. Those are finally getting worked out. That window is definitely closing fast, as Microsoft has discovered. Ubuntu is just another incompatible me-too system in this respect, except of course it's all just different enough to be incompatible. In that sense it carries on the Linux tradition, I guess.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
I can't even find a SIP phone app in the Ubuntu 13.04 repository that works!
Surely M$ will call everything deviating from their insane, patent-protected ideas "fragmentation". I call it "competition" and "diversity".
The best stuff M$ has is actually stolen from the open source community - TCP/IP, LaTeX math formulas in word, C++, DNS and a lot more. Look at the NetBios crap if you want to judge their capabilities.
It's not Microsoft setting up roadblocks. Some of the roadblocks result from traditions that were in place before Bill Gates was born. One of these is the way that devices capable of radio transmission are licensed, dating back to the Communications Act of 1934. Another is voluntary agreements among carriers not to use tech that's 20 years old, and this dates back to the Patent Act of 1790.