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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

#231

Post by unethical_ban »

Touche wrote: post #173
gerbal wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical bending their demonstrated ui talents may just lead to a better Gnome 3 experience.

Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg

That's a 6 year old screenshot. They've made incremental improvements since... but yes, I've grown to appreciate it. The most annoying part of unity7's interface is its alt-tab function: It toggles between apps, not windows, and that's annoying.

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

#232

Post by ZenoArrow »

rrdharan wrote: post #149
ZenoArrow wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If code quality is an issue, at least people who want an open-source phone OS can work on fixes: https://source.tizen.org/ I don't see many other options emerging. It's possible that a community-led effort to finish work on Unity 8 (and possibly port it to Wayland) may emerge, but that would only solve the phone UI issue, the main problem holding back open-source phones is likely to be closed bootloaders and lack of…

Doesn't really help that there's a source website if there's not a sane process for actually submitting PRs and merging patches, and apparently there isn't one.

>"and apparently there isn't one."

https://source.tizen.org/documentation/developer-guide/getti...

"This document provides information about how to contribute code to Tizen, including the following:

    * Cloning over SSH
    * Submit a patch to the Gerrit
    * Review a patch on the Gerrit
    * Submit a package to the build system
    * Review and accept a package on the build server (for release engineer only)
For more information about the whole work process, please refer to Tizen Development Working Mechanism."

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

#233

Post by unethical_ban »

jimmies wrote: post #38

I cannot wait for Unity to die, and now it does. I was not very happy when they decided to make Unity mac-like by moving the menu to the top bar. It has to be the most idiotic decision around for anyone who has multiple monitors. Even with a single monitor, it is a pain in the ass to move the mouse all the way to the top left corner for the menu to appear, and then orienting myself with the items presented.

Makes sense. Eyes are closer to the top of a screen than the bottom. Side placement of taskbar makes better use of widescreen space.

It's certainly not perfect and I had some complaints with it (I like window-local menus), but they didn't make the decisions just because.

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

#234

Post by mtalantikite »

For their embedded device support I'd like to see them go even smaller than what they list on their Core (IoT) devices page. Sure, Raspberry Pi is nice and all, but I wouldn't build an embedded system around it.

Lately I've been hacking some projects on the Arduino Industrial 101, which has a small Atheros AR9331 MIPS based SoC, but it ships with a very old OpenWRT that doesn't seem to get much in terms of updates. I spent time building a new image for it based off of the LEDE fork that is being brought back into OpenWRT, then wrestled with various parts of the Linux side of the board, but ultimately I really don't want to be managing build pipelines for Linux system updates. At this point I may just wait for AVR changes to Rust to land and ditch the Linux side all together.

That's all to say, it really would be nice to have a small footprint embedded Linux distribution that wasn't mainly focused on routers like OpenWRT (not a knock on OpenWRT). Raspberry Pi and Samsung Artik 10 aren't really something I'd completely consider as embedded systems (also not a knock on either of those boards).

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

#235

Post by unethical_ban »

kleiba wrote: post #131
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…

GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late ( http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-gnome-3-2... ). Do you really think that? To me, this is just a collection of really old stuff and features that should be a matter of course. Case in point: " the headline feature" (adjusting the color temperature of your display depending on the time of day) is something that has been around for years one way…

Yeah, and redshift has been available on Linux for a long time. Now it's built in the OS.

Windows 10 doesn't have that. What's your point?

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

#236

Post by franciscop »

sametmax wrote: post #230
franciscop wrote: post #31

Wow this is impressive just after the Ask HN they did few days back. It's been few years users complaining and opposing Mir so it seems it just took that last feedback cry. It's great that they listen to their users and also that there's going some love given back to the desktop+server (+IoT). Disclaimer: I am really happy using Ubuntu everyday.

I really wonder if they events are related though. I can't imagine Shuttlework saying "ok, those guys in HN called it", but on the other hand, the timing given motives match so perfectly.

I have no idea but my guess is that it's not the reason, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back (that's the saying, right?)

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

#237

Post by moystard »

It takes courage to reflect on previous decisions and re-consider your product strategy. I am quite impressed by Mark Shuttleworth decision to move away from Unity and the desktop/phone convergence that has been slowing down innovation for Ubuntu, and allowed other distributions to catch up.

Every Linux users should benefit from this decision; I am excited to see the improvements they will make to the Gnome environment.

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

#238

Post by bhauer »

daveguy wrote: post #225
gshulegaard wrote: post #57

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future. Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and tow…

data convergence is the future, not interface convergence . I think they made a serious mistake conflating the two. You should be able to shift your view of a document from a desktop to a laptop, but that doesn't mean the fundamental interface from one should be shoe-horned into the other. That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should…

Agreed.

Incidentally, what you describe as data convergence is part of a theoretical computing model I call PAO: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

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

#239

Post by soneil »

badloginagain wrote: post #228
AtticusTheGreat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who applauds this pivot, I never saw much value in the whole convergence idea. Why would I want my laptop and phone to be the same device? This seems to follow the misguided idea in software that if two ideas are similar, just make a single generic idea that solves both problems. But then you get into leaky abstractions and have to make lots of sacrifices to get it working well for both use cases.

I was always under the impression that convergence for the end user meant having the same 'computer' spread across many devices. That your phone has access to the same files as your laptop as your tablet. That identity and rights management was shared and unified across all devices. That your devices natively formed a network, a sandboxed cloud. I never understood it all looking the same, having a shared UI. The scre…

I have to agree that sharing the UI seems like a dead-end.

We saw this in the leap from WinCE to the iPhone, and from tablets that were essentially laptops with the monitor facing outwards, to iOS & android tablets. Besides the hardware finally getting to the right place, designing the UI for the experience was a huge leap.

"Convergence" feels far too much like trying to compromise one to suit the other, right when we've finally learnt not to do that.

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

#240

Post by nthcolumn »

rlpb wrote: post #180
gshulegaard wrote: post #57

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future. Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and tow…

I'm with you. I'd like a fully free software stack across my personal devices, and I also thought that Ubuntu had the best chance of achieving this. I think the issue is in a business model that would work for Canonical. OTOH, most of the hard work is done. My Ubuntu Phone mostly works. The stack is complete. I'd love to see interested people taking that code and keeping it going. I'd spend spare time on contributing…

A number of canonical employees here I note - OP included. So what's the mood like 'a zillion lines of code and four years later' internally? Does juju look like any better bet? Go on - we won't tell... ;)
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