This is a good thing, but having known Canonical and Ubuntu since the start (2004), I would really love to see them succeed in the desktop market first. This initiative will de-focus their efforts.
I admire them, and wish them good luck anyway.
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I've come to conclude (as a home-and-office Linux user for nigh on 15 years now) that the standard Unix gui environment of X + widget toolkits + desktop environment is just too multilayered and complex to work for non-boffins. Too many moving parts that can go subtly wrong.
You can succeed as an end-user Unix, but you have to burn down the gui architecture and start over.
Apple ditched X. Android ditched X. But no "desktop Linux" offering has yet completely ditched the legacy junk. You'd need that (and good OEM relationships) to succeed.
What' s the architecture of this Ubuntu phone gui? Is it gtk and X.org? or something new?
Canonical is in the process of ditching X: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland
Ubuntu Phone uses Qt/QML and HTML5: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/
It's too bad that X11 is still the only GUI that really works remotely (for an individual application, not a full desktop).
Web is another GUI that works remotely for an individual application. Sure it's not perfect but neither is X.
I actually think this could help their desktop OS become more popular, so I'm excited about it, especially if they don't intend to lock down their bootloaders or allow carriers or manufacturers to mess with it too much.
I just hope they don't start selling them in 2014 with obsolete technologies like the ARMv7 platform and OpenGL ES 2.0. They need to start with the 64 bit ARMv8 and OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU's. Better to start fresh, especially considering they're launching so late.
Yes Apple used the iPhone to sell more Macs after all, it is possible.
I think Ubuntu is quite successful in the desktop market.
Whenever I see GNU/Linux installation on some desktop or notebook, it's almost always Ubuntu. If people want to switch to some GNU/Linux distribution from Windows or OS X, it's almost always Ubuntu.
So in this respect, I would say they are quite successful.
The desktop market is more or less disappearing. On the business end of things, business has no issue paying the paltry sum of what windows + office costs.
I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps.
I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified other than running a variant of ubuntu like Kubuntu.
> The desktop market is more or less disappearing
I think you mean "declining" rather than disappearing.
The last I heard (october news) pc sales were expected to decline by 1% in 2012. If that means "disappearing", that would mean the auto industry has disappeared years ago.
> IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop
I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.
> it has gotten incrementally a lot better
I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce.
I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's getting better”.
> the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks
Are you sure? Not as long as Linux is something you have to install yourself. Do you use Unity? OS X manages to be approachable to everyone without alienating most geeks/developers.
I'm waiting a few years. I think eventually they'll get it right. With every update, they're slowly fixing and improving things.
I'm using OS X, and I love it. But I think Apple is going to fuck it up eventually, somehow. And hopefully, by then, Ubuntu will be a good choice.
I say this all the time but I'll say it again: Xubuntu, the flavor with Xfce as its desktop environment, has IMHO been an excellent choice for several years now. There's no tablet version but it works well, does what you expect and isn't being messed with constantly like other Linux desktops.
> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
How else are you going to access the menu with the keyboard?
> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
It's configurable.
> Do you use Unity?
After much messing around with xfce, gnome-session-fallback and cinnamon, I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the Unity just before upgrading to version 12.10.
If you think this is going to de-focus Canonical's efforts you may be in a bit of denial on what their focus is.
Their focused effort is very clearly to be a player in a tablet/phone "post PC" space. Virtually everything they've done for the past 2 years points to this. If anything, this is proof of the focus of their efforts, you (like many of us) may just not like the path they've decided to go down.
"Will de-focus?"
Anyone who was paying attention when they starting shoving Unity down user's throats knew where this was headed years ago.
The desktop market is going away in the consumer space. Unless you're targeting business, it's past the time to become relevant in desktop computing.
Bullshit, people still need to make things. Make emails, edit videos, edit photos, write documents. These aren't business class activities, but touch screens are insufficient for that function.
I don't see people lugging around a laptop anymore, but I easily see people plugging their phone into a display, throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on, and expecting a productivity environment from that device. The hardware has the power to do that now.
I can do that with my Android tablet. If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
> edit videos, edit photos, write documents
Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software. The market's refusal to port that software to Linux has essentially killed it on the desktop for a majority of users. If they dont want to port, there is absolutely nothing Canonical can do about it. A new player cannot simply enter a new market and without effort get a significant part of it.
The only thing they _can_ do is get foothold in a new market first (mobile), then leverage that to get more influence on the desktop. Like Microsoft is leveraging their desktop monopoly to get foothold in mobile.
Well Canonical doesn't produce those things by default they just bundle whatever the latest and greatest open source offering is. Which sucks compared to the professional choices out there on Mac and Windows _but_ is better than what is available on Android OS perhaps.
So in theory this a good move. In practice though, they have a huge mountain to climb. They have to market the hell out o f this and they have to provide a comparable experience to mature and battle tested mobile OSes.
I am all behind them and support them and this phone is probably something I would love as a developer (as I feel like my hands are tied when using Android) but I am afraid this will end up in a very small and irrelevant niche.
First and foremost is to ask so what major cell carrier is going to support this. If the answer is none then well we know the future of this.
> Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software.
I think, by that argument, Canonical isn't making any software, not even a GNU/Linux distribution. They might not be much involved in developing non-linear video editing software, but they are involved in the various free software projects for everything else on that list?
> If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
Sure you COULD, but serious productivity software is written to make maximal use of input devices. Keyboard shortcut usage is often not optional. That isn't going to translate to a touchscreen, or even a slide-out microkeyboards.
I think you missed the "throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on" part.
Ok. So now how are you putting the screen at a readable distance and angle?
At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?
> At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?
Because you _don't have to_ carry around a keyboard and a display if you don't plan on producing content and just want to make phone calls read ebooks.
Can I tear off the screen and keyboard off a Macbook Air and use it as a phone? No? Well then I want a Ubuntu Phone then.
Well at least in theory ...
Another way to look at it, I already have a TV, a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. As mobile hardware gets faster and better, I would eventually just love to have one device -- a phone. I could connect it to my large screen tv, a good keyboard, a smaller LCD display, USB storage and so on.
I thought it would be great to have one device as well, but then I realized that sometimes I want to use my phone while watching TV or using the laptop, so they can't really be one device, unless I wear a wireless headset, which I don't really want to carry around along with my phone (another thing to charge, another thing to lose).
I think they already realized that the desktop market is shrinking. Come to think of it, in my extended family I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop, lots of smart phones and tons of tablets.
So if they are going to wait to succeed on the desktop it might be too late. As fewer and fewer people will care about the desktop by that point.
>I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop
I'm pretty sure that when grandparent wrote, "desktop," they meant to include laptops.
On the contrary, due it being the same base, it will actually make the apps faster and more memory performant on the desktop, because it has to run in a constrained environment on mobile. I think it'll make for a more performant desktop OS.
iOS app ports certainly seem to be popular on OS X.