Live data from Hacker News

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

insights.ubuntu.com

341–350 of 470 posts

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

#341
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shotgun approach that both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone took saddens me - I think they could have done very well had they focused on acquiring power/niche users instead of trying to be a mass-market consumer product from the get-go. When the iPhone first launched, it wasn't adopted by everyone. I remember when, in ~2009, I and a few friends were the only ones I knew who had an iPhone. It wasn't until around 2011 th…

Building something lasting takes resources. Canonical simply had no chance. Even Microsoft, despite their aquisition of Nokia, their marketing budget, their massive dev resources, is failing on mobile. They even have their own convergence feature and it's not enough to attrack customers.

Microsoft made a mobile OS that didn't offer a compelling enough alternative to either iOS or Android.

iOS = Locked in ecosystem Windows Phone = Locked in ecosystem

Android = Alternative to iOS Windows = Alternative to iOS

On a technical level, Windows Phone devices performed around the same as iOS devices (fantastic), but lacked mainstream apps (the same problem as Blackberry) but without the backwards compatibility with Android apps.

Basically, Windows Phone was doomed to be the "not android, and not iOS" smartphone despite the great technical aspects of the OS.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of good things in systemd, and service-files are definitely one of them. But we could have a system that works like service-files without all the downsides of systemd.

Looking at the 20 years before systemd, we apparently couldn't. There were a lot of init systems that were better than sysvinit, but only systemd played the politics part of init system adoption correctly.

> but only systemd played the politics part

And that's why people are so against systemd. It's not a better system. Sure, it has some parts that are better, but it, as a whole, is worse. They were just able to play the politics game. Not sure why people always tout that as a positive.

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

#343
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the apps in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone. Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything worthwhile. The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install" something, then make a shell-script or something similar to…

> Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything worthwhile. Okay but to be fair: If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a lot more often. Especially for OOTB experiences ;) > The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install" something, then make a shell-script…

With BB10 (Blackberry's OS) it was backwards compatible with most Android apps, but they didn't use the resources as well and slowed the phone down. If there was a native app, I always went with the native app.

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

#344

I can't tell you how happy I am to see convergence dying. My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name of "convergence". WRT to unity, at least it's improved. Ubuntu w/ unity currently has the best multi-monitor multi-dpi user experience I've seen on linux. I have a retina laptop with 2 external displays and ubuntu unity is the only thing that just works out of the…

But it's not convergence. It's making the look and feel, and some APIs similar enough someone could target multiple machines.

I want convergence. Real bloody convergence. I want to hook my laptop's /dev and /sys , port applications over to my phone, continue using them, until I get to work, and then expand them back out there. And all the while, they would never quit, halt, freeze, or die.

Or I want to be able to collaborate on a program, send it to a buddy, have them work on it, and then get it back.

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

#345
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same behaviour as OSX. At first I also hated this behaviour, coming form the Linux/Window environment. But after using it in conjunction with ALT+` (to cycle through app's Windows) I actually find it better than the standard Windows behaviour.

My biggest issue with the macOS way is that there are edge causes when using Spaces. The biggest being "stand-alone" Chrome apps like Signal Desktop are still tied to Chrome, even though they get their own icon and a separate place on the Dock. CMD-Tab'ing to Signal Desktop might just send me to a Chrome window. Ugh.

That's why Google has been phasing out Chrome apps for a while now.

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

#346
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part I've become comfortable with the UI in Gnome 3, but I mostly avoid it. They've done a lot to fix the initial problems that the interface had, and I think they've got to a good place for the most part. Try and switch to Gnome 2 / MATE for a little bit and see the drastic improvements in responsiveness, though. That's what kills gnome 3 for me. Even on a nice high spec machine I still end up conscious…

I agree, that's why I use the Impatience extension [1]! I don't use anything GTK2 based any more as the lack of smooth scrolling support is really jarring for me, despite the fact that I still like Gnome2's basic design. [1]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/

I'm not sure what you were referring to with GTK2, but MATE uses GTK3 and preserves the Gnome 2 look.

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

#347
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tizen is a joke, they already rebooted the SDK multiple times. 1 - GTK+ based 2 - Took Bada OS C++ SDK with its Symbian C++ like flavour 3 - Rewrote the C++ API into something more appealing 4 - Thrown everything away and replaced with EFL, plain C API with C++ will come soon 5 - Now they are adopting .NET Core with Xamarin Forms How can anyone invest time developing for them?

That's even worse than the already-terrible market for FOSS phones. You get something that will have Linux or some standard API but probably disappear eventually. Then add the aggravation of having to change your stack constantly. Yeah, I'd pass on it unless it stabilizes into a standard stack. Preferably not dependent on Microsoft or Oracle tech either to reduce patent/copyright risk a bit.

Oracle aside, .NET core is open source and I don't see today's Microsoft pulling the same crap as Oracle did with Google.

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

#349
I am quite happy to see this. Although I am saddened by the death of the Ubuntu phone, this means that GNOME will get a lot more development and will receive the love and care of Canonical's excellent design teams. Gnome 3 is already shaping up to be quite a marvel, I am very excited about what will come next.

Furthermore, even if the dream of a free as in freedom Linux phone is pushed down a bit down the future, I think that a joint community/Canonical/Red Hat effort will eventually materialize.

P.S. I hope for a return to the brown and orange theme too!

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/ https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/09/23/linux-is-about-ch... https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-Janua...

I think you are taking that out of context. He's rejecting the strawman set up in the previous email. The camera breaking due to a new module has nothing to do with "choice", it had to do with a bug. You can perhaps argue that the module was pushed too soon (as he says in the last paragraph), but throw "choice" out there every time something changes is not productive. In this case, you can't have it both ways. You ca…

I've never used Fedora. As an aside, I find ArchLinux to be a much more stable bleeding-edge distro, and Ubuntu LTS to be a better stable distro.

I just found some of the most obvious examples online of "linux is not about choice". But that's also the response to systemd becoming a hard dependency in most distros, because Gnome components have dependencies on systemd components. And it's the response when systemd made it harder to have /usr on a separate partition. https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-i... And it's the response when systemd pulled in the udev tree and then started requiring devtmpfs for udev. And it's the response when you put "debug" on your kernel command line and systemd sees it and spews so much debugging output into kmsg during bootup it overloads the kernel (eventually they backed down and fixed it). And it's the response when GTK+3 3.1x made client-side decorations unconditionally enabled, breaking some window managers (eventually they backed down and fixed it). etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. They just love making life difficult for everyone else and justifying it with "linux is not about choice".

... but that's all besides the point. My point is, I agree with you: if you don't like it you can always choose to fork it (unlike Windows or macOS or a proprietary Unix). That's what Mate did. That's because linux is about choice. The philosophical opposition to that is what is wrong.

Post reply on HN