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A Month With a Ubuntu Phone
When the first Ubuntu phone came out, reviews were quick to criticize it for its lackluster hardware and unusual take on common mobile software interactions. It's been out for a while, now, and Alastair Stevenson has written about his experiences using it for an entire month. While he doesn't recommend it for phone users who aren't tech savvy, he does say that he began to like it better than Android after adjusting to how Ubuntu does things. From the article:
[T]he Ubuntu OS has a completely reworked user interface that replaces the traditional home screen with a new system of "scopes." The scope system does away with the traditional mobile interface where applications are stored and accessed from a central series of homescreens. ... Adding to Ubuntu’s otherworldly, unique feel, the OS is also significantly more touch- and gesture-focused than iOS and Android. We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ... Finally, there's my biggest criticism – Ubuntu phone is not smart enough yet. While the app selection is impressive for a prototype, in its infancy Ubuntu phone doesn't have enough data feeding into it, as key services are missing."
So, what is it like to not receive any calls for a month?
As big as Android is, I doubt Ubuntu mobile will even have as much interest from App developers as Microsoft has with Windows mobile. You basically have two
major players in mobile OS, IOS and Android. I don't see that changing, because I don't see large numbers unhappy with either. You really have to have either a niche market, or you have to see a opportunity to gain users away from a under developed unpopular product. The problem with coming to a market late as Microsoft has shown tends to leave you with little actually customers to win over. If Microsoft has got its crap together with Windows mobile sooner. It could have possible gained more users. Frankly Ubuntu has pushed away more Linux users by their drastic changes in their desktop OS. Nobody wants a OS that takes some getting used to. Just ask Microsoft about Windows 8. Three years in and only 13% of Windows users are using it.
Still can't buy one ( in the US ) = still don't care. They told us we would be able to buy them years ago. I'm glad they're still working on it. The fact that soe exist in the wild means I know it's not vaporware. At the same time, I'm starting to think I'll never be able to buy one.
We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ...
As it is I am struggling to use most features of a smart phone. I still have not figured out a reliable way to tell which parts of the screen is active and is clickable and which parts are not. For example, today I got into the Google maps directions in the "walking" mode. 13 hours of walking to destination. Could not find a way simply change from walk to car. I have seen the icon, I know it exists. But if you are already in walk mode, switching to car mode was very non-intuitive. I am sure hundreds of young slashdotters will follow up with variations of "I am not getting off your lawn, grandpa".
Now all the key features are through gestures? How are the available gestures indicated on the screen? Or we are expected to go through the entire routine of dressing in drags and doing a hoola? Is it left right left right up up down down A B A B or right left right left up up down down A B A B?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The title should be "A Month With an Ubuntu Phone" not "A Month With a Ubuntu Phone".
Sounds like the newer blackberries
Develop a phone in a market saturated with cheap products to be sold in volume. Phones are nothing more than a commodity and prices are going to dive more.
Good luck with that guys!
I was disappointed TFA didn't mention anything about what you might or might not be able to do aside from the normal functions of a phone. It's Ubuntu, after all. Do I get a shell? Do I get root? Can I install Ubuntu packages such as openssh-server, rsync, etc? Is there anything accessible resembling a real Linux environment?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In regards to the short battery life... could this perhaps be because it's written by developers who are used to a desktop environment, and thus, have very little experience writing mobile operating systems?
WIth Ubuntu Phone/Touch (I swear they keep flipping what they're calling it) you get a shell, and last I used it the interface was actually pretty good. However, although many nice packages are shipped installed, you cannot by default install normal packages yourself because the root filesystem is read-only, and is updated as an incremental image with each new version. So you can disable that read-only nature and then install your own packages, but that then disables system upgrades, and if you re-enable system upgrades you are by definition wiping out all your installed packages.
In this respect I've found SailfishOS far more familiar, even though it's an RPM-based distro and I'm far more familiar with DEB-based distros, because SailfishOS under the hood acts exactly like any other distro, it just happens to run on your phone (with much of the gesture-based swishiness of Ubuntu Phone). If I want to install git, I just type "pkcon install git" or whatnot and I get it. If a system library has a bug, I can recompile it with a fix myself and replace the .so. In theory Ubuntu Phone is more open than SailfishOS (which has several components that are closed-source still), but in practice I find SailfishOS far more open in that it doesn't discourage you from playing around under the hood---not to mention that their stack is far more standard (Wayland, PackageKit+RPM, etc) than Ubuntu Phone's stack (with Mir, the whole Snappy thing and "click-packages", etc).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It's all pretty automatic, nearly zero user knowledge needed. And then you can test it out for yourself instead of doing something both scandalous and in this case useless anyways like RTFA'ing. But no, seriously, if you're curious at all, it really is quite easy to set up, and I do think worth it since you'll far more easily discover what Ubuntu Phone (and any other Linux-based smartphone platform you feel like tinkering with, or other Android ROMs) really is and how you do or don't like it.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Fans of the Ubuntu desktop OS will be glad to know that Whoopsie, Geoclue, and Zeitgeist were among the first apps ported to the Ubuntu phone.
I have a friend that swears by SailfishOS. Great info, thanks for sharing.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
IMHO the biggest strategic blunder of all this mobile Linux distributions is that they break compatibility with standard X11 / Linux. Why be incompatible?
I know for Sailfish the reason was that they could get access to Android drivers more easily by using Wayland instead of X11, but for me it meant that I completely lost interest in Sailfish at this point. Maybe XWayland will run someday... or does it already?
I also still believe that the networking of X11 would be really great if exploited properly - especially for a mobile device: Why can't I move the window of the address book app from my smartphone to my desktop, cut & paste some numbers from another application on my desktop, etc...
Can I put Ubuntu on a typical Verizon Android smartphone and boot into either OS? It would be fun to experiment/learn/play with Ubuntu and have the ability to also use the phone natively.
One thing that is always in-by-face (and I'd think would be in everyone's face) is how different we all are. My first thought upon reading this missing-stores defect, is that if the platform did have this stuff, I'd want to disable it and that's especially true given how he describes the scopes UI. That doesn't mean Amazon integration is bad (it's good that a platform can do it) but it's going to be subjectively bad for a lot of people. And great for also-a-lot of people. Know what I mean? All our actual lives are customized, and everything that resists this reality becomes a grating, annoying thing.
More Examples:
That sounds both cool and also like pure hell, as does this:
Thus one of the things I wish the reviewer talked about, was how much the user can control what contributes to the information in a "scope." This is presumably Free Software, so I can disable the "music recommendations" or the "facebook data source" part (or not install them in the first place), right? Probably, but c'mon reviewer, tell us. One of the worst things about the absolutely shitty phones (iOS and Android) on the market right now, is how not in control we are. That's a big part of why the market so intensely wants new players to blow away the shit (*) and why people might want to try Ubuntu. Yet I don't see any words about this advantage existing.
(*) I laugh at how some fuckwits are saying the game is over because Android and iOS have already won and there's no room for new platforms. That's like saying MacOS 7 and Windows 3.11 have sewn up the desktop so nobody needs to try to improve the desktop anymore.
Ubuntu's click packages take advantage of dpkg and are basically simplified deb packages, so I wouldn't call them foreign.
The read-only nature of the default file system is there for a good reason: It allows them to ensure the integrity of the image, resulting in simple updates without file conflicts. If user A is on update 189, then user B with update 189 has the exact same files on his system partition. Other advantages include: clean rollbacks in case of an error (no failed partial upgrades with files strewn about) , and much simpler troubleshooting because there are fewer variables involved, meaning less buggy software in the long run.
I hope the desktop is also moved to an image-based update system in the future. Fewer headaches all around.