Although long talked about, the Ubuntu Edge campaign exemplified the concept best with its “super phone” boast: your phone would hook up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and become a fully functioning Ubuntu desktop PC. Phone apps would run on the desktop in an appropriate guise like responsive websites do on phones.
Today, ahead of Mobile World Congress next month, Ubuntu Desktop Manager Will Cooke has posted a three-minute video that shows how Canonical’s engineering team is progressing.
My dream smartphone would be a phone that automatically turns into a PC the moment I get home. It knows I’m home, wirelessly and automatically hooks up to my display, mouse, and keyboard in my office, and done. Of course, it’d also automatically detect other displays and input devices in my house – say, a remote control and my TV.
Ubuntu is working on it.
Last thing I want is a Ubuntu phone that tries to turn into a PC, given that they haven’t even managed to get the PC part right.
Yeah, for a number of small reasons, Linux just isn’t a good desktop OS. They’ll have to solve that first.
Good idea though.
For a number of small reasons, it’s still better than Windows 8, which is a clusterf–k. Windows 10 doesn’t seem to be that different either.
Edited 2015-02-28 12:52 UTC
Windows 8 still runs all Windows desktop apps. That’s a big plus, stupid metro screen or not.
IMHO, they seem to have far too many irons in the fire. They seem to want to be the MS of the Linux world.
Already a lot of people equate Ununtu ===== Linux.
I liked Ubuntu in the early days. It was a breath of fresh air. Now? Meh!
My guess that this is all down to the race to monetize their offerings. Mr Shuttleworth does not have ifninite cash with which to subsidise the produts.
Guys, guys guys…
Canonical is not your grassroots Linux Mint or Mageia non-profit charity. They are a company burning through lots of money, and aiming to make money. What does this mean? Shuttleworth eventually realized there is no point in being a company burning through millions of dollars, just to do what many non-profit charities already do, aka pass a brown or purple brush over vanilla Gnome and draw some new icons.
Shuttleworth realized that he has to differentiate his product, in order to go looking for new customers. This is what the whole deal with Mir and Unity is. The Linux that Canonical makes is not inteded for the Linux Mint and Mageia crowd, get over it.
Of course, there is always the danger of not being able to find new customers, while losing the Mint/Mageia customers. In fact, this is what I think will happen.
But ya know, this is what entrepreneurship is about. Shuttleworth is not a charity man, his is a businessman. He operates on the “what if it works” principle, even if the chances are one to a thousand (wrestle crowd out of Apple, MS and Google). Deal with it (sunglasses).
Edited 2015-02-28 12:28 UTC
Mir is very much a dead-end after Canonical secretely forked Wayland and spread fear, doubt and uncertainty. They should drop that Not Invented Here software syndrome and improve the support to Wayland.
Considering the size of company, Canonical cannot afford to overstretch.
Since Wayland is developed by the same hard-core FSF fanatics as X.org is, I wouldn’t trust them to keep APIs stable and not break proprietary gpu drivers. Sorry, this is how things are.
This is what all the talk about protocol-agnostic, “well-defined” and the like in MirSpec is about: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Weston.3F
Shuttleworth is telling the FSF dudes of Wayland, in his usual polite doublespeak, “your software (Wayland) will combine with proprietary drivers and apps like sodium and water do (much like it happens with X.org)”
Remember, Canonical wants new customers, they ‘ve said it themselves. If they sell a fancy Meizu MX4, and Wayland aka X.org:Reloaded starts breaking GPU drivers and app compat here and there, their plan of acquiring new customers will be doomed even from a theoretical perspective (it is doomed from a practical perspective already, the lock-in Apple, MS and Google have on users is too strong).
Edited 2015-02-28 22:05 UTC
Lets be historically correct here, if you have properly read that paragraph, the 2013 rebuttal was from Wayland developers who are also Xorg developers having caught Canonical outright lies about Wayland before the MirSpec wiki got changed since then.
https://plus.google.com/+KristianH%C3%B8gsberg/posts/jDq6BAg…
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNzY
If you want to call Daniel Stone, Kristian Høgsberg and most Xorg developers FSF fanactics including those from Intel, then you managed to make your entire post look foolish because Wayland is a MIT license meaning proprietry drivers can be used.
Then can you explain how Jolla, Tizen, GENIVI and Rasberry Pi which use Wayland protocol and are already out in the consumer market since 2013 failed to encounter GPU drivers issue?
Those examples show what Canonical could do should they stick with Wayland. The 3D input part posted on MirSpec will be already taken care by libinput (http://who-t.blogspot.ca/2014/09/libinput-common-input-stack-for-wa…).
Edited 2015-03-01 01:48 UTC
It seems to me that Mir predates the libinput solution, and it was one of the Mir needs, AFAIK
Do you anti-Mir people also want only one Linux distribution to exist? Which one?
That question makes no sense because Mir is made for Ubuntu and its derivative only as evident with its Clause Licensing Agreement while majority of Linux distributions moves toward Wayland protocol.
Mir is not even ready and got delayed for 2016, reason is display manager is one of the most difficult software to work. Meanwhile, Wayland protocol are already implemented to several desktop environments (including GNOME, KDE and Enlightement), GPU drivers through MESA (Direct contribution from both Intel and AMD) and Nouveau (Open source version of Nvidia supplanting the old nv) and Freedreno.
Those examples still prove Mir is a waste of time that comes haunting Canonical who are afraid to admit wrong and rejoin Wayland development.
This was really impressive. Can’t wait that my BQ Ubuntu Phone arrives
The Bq Ubuntu Phone and the Meizy MX4 Ubuntu edition do not do the cool dock-it-and-it-becomes-a-desktop trick. The phone needs to have 32GB internal storage for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch#Hardware_requirements
Hope that not many fellow geeks bought the Bq thinking it ‘ll do this, because Canoncial will acquire lots of disgrunted customers.
But maybe the geeks who are also nerds will be able to enable the feature themselves.
Edited 2015-02-28 12:53 UTC
Yes, I know. But thanks anyway.
Those touch targets are way too small to work with comfortably. So using this without a mouse or stylus, even for simple things, is basically a no-no.
Apple uses one OS for touch (IOS) and one OS for non-touch (OSX)
Microsoft uses one kind of software for touch (Store-Apps) and one for non-touch (“Desktop”-Apps)
Google uses one OS for touch (Android), one for non-touch (Chrome) and is trying to create a hybrid (Chrome-OS)
And Ubuntu is trying to do it all with one OS, one application on one device…That would be wonderful if they can pull it of, but this looks more like a pure tech demo (mouse connect/disconnect works) than it looks like anything that a consumer would use
That’s because it was a tech demo. Obviously the point wasn’t to show mouse connection, but switching from touch mode to desktop and vice versa on the fly. The mouse was just a trigger.
Edited 2015-03-01 21:12 UTC
If the focus was that on-the-fly switching they didn’t have to demo entering numbers in a spreadsheet. When they showed that this demo wasn’t a pure tech demo anymore but became consumer focussed and from a consumer point of view this tech seems quite useless in this state