My Favorite Command For Ubuntu Touch/Tablet

[phoronix]

Phoronix: My Favorite Command For Ubuntu Touch/Tablet

Here's some more details on my adventures with the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview after experimenting with it for a little more than 24 hours on the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwOTM

[Figueiredo]

I wonder how does canonical plan to maintain these kernels going forward. Are they going to simply rely on CM?

Single kernel soc support can't come soon enough.

What are the hard kernel requirements anyway? I assume ICS/JB compatible kernel...

[z0id]

So all they need to do now is help bring about Wayland quicker, port Unity to Qt/QML and Wayland and the phablet/tv interface to Wayland and then you'll have what it says on the package: one codebase to rule them all.

[dalingrin]

Are you able to run X11 and normal ubuntu apps at all?

Sounds like I'd rather just run Android and have Ubuntu in a chroot which I've been able to do for years.

Nonetheless, I'm still looking forward to seeing how Canonical's efforts with their touch interface turn out next year.

[Vadi]

Thanks for the explanation of how things work, that helped clear some concepts up!

[scionicspectre]

I can see GTK-favoring developers having a hard time taking this approach seriously. First of all, this would mean porting GTK to run on SurfaceFlinger- there are already so many efforts going into Wayland that I doubt this is on the radar for the GTK+ devs at all. Also, if Ubuntu does eventually port everything to Wayland, it would open up Enlightment's libraries and GTK to run easily on Ubuntu Touch, but would likely sacrifice the broad device compatibility they are currently offering. So this puts many areas of the developer community in a tough spot if they really want to create a UI for each experience. Some applications are simply not modular enough to support a Qt frontend out of nowhere on a mobile device, but many current GTK apps would make a lot of sense if adapted for a tablet.

I really want this to work out, but the community is so spread out- I think a lot of developers who would support this just won't come around until everything's made a bit more seamless. Of course, this doesn't matter for any traditional smartphone OS- just get enough developers that will work on your platform. Qt is becoming quite the starlet of mobile development, as we had hoped. However, Ubuntu's going for a much broader vision- to provide a conformant set of useful apps that act similarly across form-factors. It's going to take a while to get there, even if the important and visible apps come over.

All this skepticism aside, it's still a nice platform and quite interesting if it can really dock to provide a full (ARM) desktop experience. Once we get an image that can do this, I'll definitely be trying it out since it feels like the right way to converge the experiences (unlike, say, Windows 8).