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Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

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Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#121

Post by SXX »

ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #18

I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)? As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or…

> what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)?

And also ignore locked bootloaders, DRM code in ARM TrustZone, never updated BSP that make most devices use old kernels, userspace blobs for graphics and video playback, lack of proper hardware documentation and fact that most of out-of-tree drivers that are open source are simply horrible.

Google never wanted FOSS stack on your phone in first place. Same true for phone manufacturer's, hardware vendors, carriers, media companies and governments.

So there simple not much you can do other that support rare open hardware efforts and use extremely overpriced custom-built phones.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#122

Post by DCKing »

Paul-ish wrote: post #88
ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #18

I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)? As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or…

What I don't understand is Shuttleworth basically said "the market has spoken, and does not want an Ubuntu phone." But I checked their website a few times a year to see if I could buy an Ubuntu phone and always saw a message about "Coming soon" or "sold out". How was the market supposed to get their hands on Ubuntu phone?

I think he means that they were not able to sell the idea to device vendors sufficiently. The 'market' he refers to are the device vendors, not the end users.

If you make a mobile operating system but you don't make devices, you need to be able to convince device vendors to sell the product for you to end users. They didn't succeed in that.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#123

Post by smartt »

Paul-ish wrote: post #88
ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #18

I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)? As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or…

What I don't understand is Shuttleworth basically said "the market has spoken, and does not want an Ubuntu phone." But I checked their website a few times a year to see if I could buy an Ubuntu phone and always saw a message about "Coming soon" or "sold out". How was the market supposed to get their hands on Ubuntu phone?

I'm in the same boat. I backed the original Ubuntu Edge indiegogo campaign, but it never happened. And I would check the site periodically to see if there was a phone that shipped/worked in the States (and there never was) or if it was running on anything newer than a Nexus 5.

FirefoxOS phones were pretty much the same story. Limited hardware that wasn't available in the US market.

With both, it may not have been a lack of global interest; but a lack of interest in the limited markets they chose to release in.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#124

Post by doppioandante »

Unity has often been criticized because it was a Canonical thing and didn't leverage Wayland, but it's another world compared to Gnome shell. I couldn't like gnome shell no matter what.

I was using Gnome shell on a old eeepc. The interface is dumbed down and you have to install a bunch of extensions to make it as functional as Unity.

What was worse is that the launcher automatically triggered the search function, and that slowed down the pc to a crawl. I'm using KDE on it now and, even though less stable, it has a decent interface and it is surprisingly snappy.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#125

Post by hd4 »

I'm one of the people who asked for less NIH in Ubuntu in the recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 but I didn't think they would take it this far. Jokes aside, it's sad that Unity won't be developed further.

I'm one of the ones who loves Unity 7, it's always been faster and less memory hungry than GNOME or KDE for me. I will just have to cling onto the LTS for as long as possible.

In the long-term I think this is good for Ubuntu and Linux users in general, less diversity can sometimes help an ecosystem form. I think many users just want a DE to stay out of the way and make life easier, so I hope some of the Ubuntu ease of use focus and community will get injected back into GNOME. I really hope a huge flood of users coming back forces them to look at their memory usage and get it under control.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#126

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

jhasse wrote: post #61
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #37

GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late ( http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-gnome-3-2... ). I'm still using Cinnamon, because I still like the look a bit more, but it's getting harder to ignore all of the excellent features GNOME provides, including: - Drive support for file manager - Gmail/Outlook support for GNOME accounts and built-in calendars - Working Wayland implementation I'm h…

Check out https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/55/media-player-indic...

It looks like it needs to be hard-coded for compatibility with every app, which makes it not so friendly. Wouldn't work with the unofficial Google Music Desktop Player (https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/), for instance, which I use heavily.

EDIT: Nevermind, this ticket looks like it might: https://github.com/MarshallOfSound/Google-Play-Music-Desktop...

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#127

Post by kleiba »

tradesmanhelix wrote: post #100

"Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence" Translation: "We don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop because it's not making us much $$$." Dear Canonical, Your actions are a huge let down to the community. You caused a lot of strife with the move away from Gnome to Unity in 2010, and now you're ripping the rug out from under even more users after feeding us crap about converge…

1. You say that Canonical's move from Gnome to Unity in 2010 caused a lot of strife. 2. Now they're undoing that step.

Shouldn't you be happy rather than disappointed?

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#128

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

jstanley wrote: post #48
onli wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jep, I don't understand it. It is completely understandable to drop a product that is not working on the market. It is less understandable to drop a product that never really was on the market, after the big initial investment is already done. Same for FF, same for WebOS: How can you draw the conclusion that something is not working on the market if you never tried making it available to customers, on regular hardwar…

> you never tried making it available to customers, on regular hardware? I'm pretty sure they tried very hard indeed. They just didn't succeed. I say this as a long-time user of Ubuntu Touch. I don't love it, it is not without its flaws. It's just the best mobile OS I've found, primarily because it doesn't nag you with privacy-invasion at every turn. I'll miss it when it's gone.

> I'm pretty sure they tried very hard indeed. They just didn't succeed.

I don't know about this. The last phone they released was the Meizu Pro 5, which had an Android variant (sold in stores) and an Ubuntu variant (sold online only, and you had to dig for it if you didn't get redirected from ubuntu.com). The hardware itself for the phone wasn't awful by any means, but buying one was hard enough because the manufacturer only sold out of Asia.

Further, the Meizu Pro 5 didn't work on most networks in Canada and the United States. Why would I buy a phone that doesn't support 3G/4G? I'd _love_ to support Canonical by purchasing an Ubuntu touch device, but you could hardly say that they tried. Their handsets were few and far between, and they locked out a large portion of the market because of the phone's baseband frequencies.

I think that they could have succeeded, at least in the small, had they actually released a device that power users could use comfortably.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#130

Post by greenhouse_gas »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #44
ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #18

I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)? As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or…

I'd suggest the best remaining option for a FOSS-driven phone (now that Canonical have dropped the ball) is Tizen. It's got the backing of a large phone manufacturer (Samsung) and the Linux Foundation, and seems to be actively developed. It'll probably end up being used on low-end devices at first, but is likely to be more open than the two leading platforms, so hopefully they get some traction amongst tech community…

How is Tizen different then Android from a privacy/OS perspective?

What will stop Samsung from closing it off when it gets too popular? (And, BTW, it's not like Samsung hardware is the pinnacle of OS design. Exynos is notorious for being hard to make custom ROMs)

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