UBports community delivers 'second-largest release of Ubuntu Touch ever'
- Reference: 1616065431
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/18/ubports_community_delivers_secondlargest_release/
- Source link:
Ubuntu Touch was originally an official Canonical project, with version 1.0 released in 2013, but the company withdrew in early 2017 when CEO Mark Shuttleworth [1]stated :
[2]
"I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts."
The move also ended the development of the Unity desktop, intended to converge desktop and mobile, with Ubuntu reverting to GNOME.
[3]
The community-supported UBports project, founded by Norwegian Marius Gripsgard, took over development and released Ubuntu Touch 15.04 OTA-2 in September 2017. That the team has moved up to OTA-16 is impressive; the less good news is that mobiles running Ubuntu Touch are a long way from mainstream.
[4]
Ubuntu Touch running on a range of devices (pic: UBports [5]CC-BY-SA-4.0 )
It can be pre-installed on [6]Volla Phone or installed after purchase on a range of devices including [7]Fairphone and around 50 others. PinePhone is supported in general by Ubuntu Touch but not by this release. Unfortunately, we do not have any of the compatible devices to hand so a try-out with OTA-16 will have to wait.
The [8]new release updated the Qt framework used for the OS from 5.9.5 to 5.12.9. "Upgrading it put us back inside Qt's long-term support cycle," the team stated, as well as enabling future new features. It also helps prepare for an upgrade of the base OS from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04, though OTA-16 is still based on 16.04.
The web browser in Ubuntu Touch is called Morph, and based on the [9]Qt WebEngine , which uses de-Googled code from the Chromium project. In this release there is a revamped download system, a fixed-page zoom, and a new checkbox to "always deny location" for a specific web page.
A previous Canonical-developed web engine called Oxide has not been used since 2018; it seems that some Ubuntu Touch apps depend on Oxide and we were warned that these will now not work. Anbox, which lets users run Android applications, now has its installer included by default, but Anbox itself is not pre-installed. Video recording, which was broken on 32-bit phones designed for Android 7, has been fixed, and there are a number of other improvements.
Ubuntu Touch is not the only Linux-based OS for smartphones. There is also the Debian-based [10]PureOS , used by Librem devices, KDE-supported [11]Plasma Mobile , Jolla's [12]Sailfish OS , [13]postmarketOS , and more. There are others, like the [14]/e/ Foundation , which uses an OS based on the [15]Android Open Source Project with code added to fill the gap left by Google's proprietary apps and services. All the options have minuscule market share and are likely to elicit blank looks for those who enquire about them at their local mobile phone stores.
The difficulty has been that while it is easy to see the value of a strong open-source alternative to Android and iOS, there are almost too many options, none of which have mainstream appeal.
[16]
The thinking behind Ubuntu Touch, and a possible way out of the problem, was always convergence – the idea that one carefully designed OS can run on both mobile and desktop, and perhaps both at once via connection to a desktop display, keyboard, and mouse. It is a long-standing concept that seems to make sense, but has proved so far impossible to implement well enough to win mass appeal. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFOHLXjNhQMcVPV9ctqg4wAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFOHLXjNhQMcVPV9ctqg4wAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/17/background_banner-core-devices.jpg
[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
[6] https://volla.online/en/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/28/fairphone_3_plus/
[8] https://ubports.com/blog/ubport-blogs-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-16-release-3744
[9] https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
[10] https://pureos.net/
[11] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/
[12] https://sailfishos.org/
[13] https://postmarketos.org/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/12/android_without_google_e_smartphone/
[15] https://source.android.com/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFOHLXjNhQMcVPV9ctqg4wAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Yes.
"Windows phone was really easy and welcoming and great to use (and that's coming from a Linux user)."
And it still is!
Re: Yes.
Even better, now that Microsoft has given up on it, you are free to enjoy the Windows phone and not be spammed with updates and other monetization strategies.
Since my phone doesn't connect to the internet (... because its a phone), I believe it to be much safer than an always connected Android / iOS.
Why not fork Android + make it a shell
Why try to beat Android, why not just fork it and make it better. Do a proper tablet treatment on it. No more full screen phone dialers, and full screen single pane control panels with one button on them, no more apps that require you pick up the tablet, its keyboard and case and hold it portrait to use the app! 512MB heap limit.... that doesn't need to be, it could have a proper virtual memory manager.. Give Android a proper app lifecycle and port Libre Office to it.
It's waiting to be done, and it could be done as an Ubuntu shell if you want.
I've got my Chuwi Hipad plus tablet and the hardware is great, brilliant 4:3 huge screen, cheap price, fast processor,... but Android....this is the first time I've had to deal with a pure Google Android and I'm not happy.
For example, the navigation bar is huge, it eats a big chunk of the lower screen, it looks like its sized bigger because it can waste more screen! As if peoples fingers grow larger with available screen space. No option to make it smaller. If I switch to gestures, the gesture works anywhere along the bottom screen, so all the swipe up trays I had to use to get me more screen space now also swipe away the app. You lose the whole bottom edge not just the middle portion.
I can pin the app, with app pinning, so gesture swipe doesn't swipe away the app, but some idiot decided they should also hide the status bar notifications for pinned apps, even notifications FOR THE APPLICATION PINNED. So the app is important enough to pin it, yet unimportant enough that you don't need to see its notifications!??
The same random slowdown when crunching a big model too, sometimes it's fast, sometimes its really really slow, I've been seeing this on every Android tablet since Android 9. Let me guess some idiotic AI based thread scheduler? Think you're optimizing for efficiency but actually confusing efficiency with power consumption? Some lazy garbage collect... why garbage collect if Android is only supposed to run mini applets? Something like that? Ditch the idiotic AI in it.
White notification icons?? No wonder OEM's don't follow Google on this. I have color coordinated icons, I can glance and see the category from the color, then the detail of the icon tells me if I need to deal with it now, or it can wait. I can just look, I don't need to swipe down the tray. But under pure Android 10, the icons are blended to remove the detail and look like plain colored dots on the notification tray, these become white dots on the status bar. A line of useless white dots conveying no information at all, I have to swipe it down everytime.
Form over function.
Now it fights harder to get you to enable Google Play Services, I do not want this google crap on a tablet, but its gonna beep at me endlessly till I complete the setup with no chance of disabling those notifications or that setup app.
Build a firewall in it FFS.
I get it, Android is a toy, a way for Google to spy on users, *but* that also makes it forkable and it could be the basis for a half decent OS on tablets that is sorely missing right now.
But not with Google at the helm.
Re: Why not fork Android + make it a shell
You mean /e/ as stated in the article!?
But if you bother to look at any of the alternate OSes listed, there's not a single 2020 or later phone supported that I could see. /e/ are the best, but most of the 2018/19 phones are marked (beta)
Sad, but I'm not digging my N4 out of the draw, things have moved on.
Re: Why not fork Android + make it a shell
/e/ is a vanilla port.
Re: Why not fork Android + make it a shell
Look Ubuntu guys.
1) Fix Android, adult interface choices, proper memory manager, proper lifecycle on a solid OS.
2) Do it as a proper compositing GUI, not a crappy 'memory composite' refreshed into a window, aka ChromeOS. Adding a gui around a gui is to add nothing of value, and just makes the refresh really crap.
3) Port Libreoffice, Thunderbird, Firefox to it, you will have proper lifecycles, memory management and so on, so you don't need crappy Android half assed versions.
4) Take Android from Google, this is Android without Google spyware.
Re: Why not fork Android + make it a shell
You'll come back to the same problem that Microsoft and BB OS faced - a lack of apps. Android itself is open source, but the App Store can only be installed with Google's permission. You may be able to sideload it, but how viable is that for the mass market?
Waiting to land my Sailfish
If Sailfish extends to Oppo/RealMe devices, I'd be keen to give it a go. Especially now it's up to Android 9 in its compatibility mode, that's close enough to the 10 my phone uses.
Yes.
" The thinking behind Ubuntu Touch, and a possible way out of the problem, was always convergence – the idea that one carefully designed OS can run on both mobile and desktop, and perhaps both at once via connection to a desktop display, keyboard, and mouse. It is a long-standing concept that seems to make sense, but has proved so far impossible to implement well enough to win mass appeal. "
Which is what brought anger upon Microsift for Windows 8, and also lead to MS abandoning windows phone (plus the issue with the few available apps, and the ever-changing way apps were built and how developers were treated...).
So convergence did fail then. It will still fail, because what makes sense on a small screen with touch capabilities is ugly and stupid on a regular desktop. Windwos 8 did make sense on a small-ish touch screen machine, and Windows phone was really easy and welcoming and great to use (and that's coming from a Linux user).