Yes! Yes yes yes!
IMO possibly what I think of as the lost years of Ubuntu are over.
I tried a few times but concluded that they had decided to go in a direction where I didn't want to go.
Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
351–360 of 470 posts
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#352For 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…
The problem is that all these routers and a lot of the embedded stuff don't get updates due to shitty vendor drivers for a lot of components. Most of the work on LEDE/OpenWRT is from volunteers that just want to make it work. Usally these devices/boards ship with an SDK from the manufacturer that is often based on OpenWRT but has some hard dependency on an ancient kernel, non-GPL sources or messy GPL drivers that need a lot of work until they can be upstreamed to the kernel.
That beeing said, LEDE is not only for routers - I think the ubus/procd/netifd system is pretty great - there is uhttpd-mod-ubus that allows you to configure everything via json-rpc (also websocket support is coming)
Maybe the tradeoffs from LEDE to run with fine with a current kernel/userland on 32mb (or even 16mb ram) / 4mb flash devices might make it more complicated to use it as general purpose system.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#353Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…
More important I guess than code contributions to gnome they stopped distributing gnome.
If I am at all representative for early Ubuntu users they themselves might also have lost quite a few enthusiastic fans in the process.
From what I read here they won quite a few enthusiastic users as well so it's not all black and white though.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now, I've come to realize that the interface better be separate for different usecases - plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work. What I want is seamless takeover from one device to another - something like Apple's continuity but way better. In today world this is all scattered into different components*, the first company that…
> I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now, I've come to realize that the interface better be separate for different usecases - plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of how continuum works in Windows. The interface is separate when you hook up a phone into a dock (it's a desktop interface) and the newer devices can also do it wirelessly.
Windows went with a "similar UI language" for all platforms but still maintained huge differences between each platform because that made sense. It was never the same UI.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unfortunately, in this particular "market", Google has a complete, and uncontested monopoly. :/
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#356Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…
While I agree that there are, in fact, way too many distros and desktops in the Linux space, I disagree with the sense that Ubuntu did damage towards a goal of fewer choices. Just because Gnome is there doesn't mean it's ultimately the best software for the job and sure they likely could have driven a lot of improvements to it but sometimes there needs to be experimentation. If Unity was more popular and found its way to more distros then maybe we'd even seen it go the other way and Gnome would die thus still working towards the goal of fewer choices.
I think it's important for experimentation to occur. Don't contribute to the incumbents only because you want the fewest opinions available.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#357Earlier 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.
In today's market, I think Microsoft would rather give a competitor a royalty free permanent license to all their patents than let Google continue to just own the industry. Mobile is only one of the many markets they compete in, but Google is using their mobile dominance to help lead and push their expansion elsewhere. Microsoft needs a new mobile OS option out there, even if it isn't theirs.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gnome (for major versions > 2) is even worse than Unity though. They should've chosen an actually usable DM like Cinnamon.
100% disagree. Used Mint(& Cinnamon) for years. Recently switched to Fedora 24/25 (+ Gnome). I will never go back. Gnome is way more polished and enjoyable to use. Actually enjoyable.
Will give it a try given time but I don't have high hopes for anything that messes with menus (was enthusiastic when I got a Mac at a previous job, positively interested in Ribbon but it turns out that for me traditional menus still wins comfortably.)
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#359Earlier 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.
My phone is a computer. My chromebook is a screen attached to a computer. My desktop is a monitor attached to a computer. My work laptop is a screen attached to a computer. My tablet is a screen attached to a computer. Why do I need so many separate computers when I have my phone on me at all times?
Because my work computer is owned by work, my phonr by me, and the desktop by my family. They don't want an unused monitor and docking station when my phone isn't there.
Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
#360I like the pragmatism in this letter: "What the Unity8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."
Ubuntu has done well in growing the Linux community. I hope they continue interesting work in the future.