Ubuntu for phones

[Mize]

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/02/ubuntu-for-smartphones/

Personally I'm more excited about this OS (no Java VM, thank you!) than I've been about any Android, WMX, webOS, MeeGo, etc. Sure a lot of pieces need to fall into place (making tiny screen, touch versions of the many great linux apps for instance or getting hardware vendors on board), but for a demo of software nearly a year away from completion it sure looks good.

 

[Vadi]

I tried a chroot install, and with a tiling window manager like i3 and a real keyboard it is interesting.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Why would anyone want this over Android or even Tizen?
Honest question.

One has some 80% of the whole smartphone market and one of the fastest growing app market ever, the other is backed up by two of the largest industry giants: Intel and Samsung. What does Ubunto have that the others don't?

 

[Mize]

Android, Tizen, webOS, Mozilla are all based on the phone as a glorified web browser (i.e. Java VM or html5 engines). Ubuntu can certainly run a Java app or html5 app, but it also has direct, low-level access and Qt which means faster execution and lower memory footprints for apps. It also means one could have a single device as both phone and primary computer (think Asus Padfone but with a real, desktop OS inside).

I don't know if you've ever used an Android tablet, but it's a far cry from a real OS. I had an Asus Transformer for a while and, while it might have looked like a laptop, it was crap for content creation of any type.

So I imagine a "phone" that can tether or be installed in a laptop chassis like the Transformer/Padfone, but with a real desktop-worthy OS.

On top of that you have far better direct-to-filesystem access, more flexibility and full-blown linux underneath so you don't run into issues like Android's latest "can't install apps on the external-SDcard without jumping though crazy hoops" mess. Just change your mount points and be done with it.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I don't know if you've ever used an Android tablet, but it's a far cry from a real OS. I had an Asus Transformer for a while and, while it might have looked like a laptop, it was crap for content creation of any type.

I'm in my 3rd Android tablet now (Advent Vega -> Sony Tablet S -> Transformer Infinity) and I love using tablets for reading mangas/comics, watching tv series (the Infinity's gorgeous screen is perfect for 1080p content) and browsing the web.

As for being crap for content creation, well that's pretty obvious to me. There's no practical text input and the screens are tiny compared to 13" laptops, so why would anyone think they'd be practical for anything other than media consumption?

But that doesn't mean that Android is forcefully bad for content creation. I'd imagine that a Transformer TF201/300/700 with the keyboard dock, a mouse in the USB plug, a 24" screen connected through HDMI and OfficeSuite 6 installed would be perfectly suitable for doc, excel and powerpoint creation.

Of course, they still can't do what a full-fledged $400 laptop can because the CPUs are still slow-ish, the amount of RAM is very low and the memory bandwidth is also lacking, but they're getting there.

 

[Mize]

I had the transformer 700 with keyboard and three office suites (and a mouse and a monitor over hdmi).

Compared to Ubuntu 11 on a 2009 MacBook it was dreadful. Even today many of the best Android apps are poor at best on a tablet.

 

[Laurent06]

I had the transformer 700 with keyboard and three office suites (and a mouse and a monitor over hdmi).

Compared to Ubuntu 11 on a 2009 MacBook it was dreadful. Even today many of the best Android apps are poor at best on a tablet.

Hum that Mac CPU probably is about 3-4 times faster than the one in the TF700, so I'm not sure this shows Android supposed slowness.

 

[Mize]

Hum that Mac CPU probably is about 3-4 times faster than the one in the TF700, so I'm not sure this shows Android supposed slowness.

Speed wasn't the issue - app robustness was.
Working on a Powerpoint or Word doc doesn't require a hefty CPU (and we're talking Tegra 3 vs. Core2Duo which really aren't that far apart), but the functionality of the Android office suites is roughtly 1% of LibreOffice.

Want to open a Powerpoint, edit a drawing or a pasted excel graph, etc. etc.? Have fun on Android or iOS with that.

Then there is the "slowness" issue of running everything in a Java VM rather than as a native binary...

 

[Grall]

Just change your mount points and be done with it.

Then we come to the issue of how one goes about actually doing that, knowing about how to do that, and even knowing why you even NEED to do that. This is pretty much linux in a nutshell. You have some kind of issue, a linux wizard burps up a "oh that's so easy, you just <insert arcane magic spell here> and you're done!" Typically involving typing a long string of console commands into a command shell, or manually editing a configuration file in vi, which in of itself requires a degree from Miskatonic University to understand...

If you need ubuntu on a mobile device, I suggest a laptop. Serious content generation on a phone is always going to suck no matter what anyway, proper OS or not.

 

[Mize]

LOL Grall. Great post.

Linux, of course, isn't all like that anymore. There are plenty of GUI tools to do such things but, more importantly, there is an OS community that would prevent ever needing such a fix as Ubuntu wouldn't do such a silly thing

As for content creation, of course I wouldn't want to use a phone with my old eyes. But the prospect of having a laptop-style "dock" for my phone (a la Asus Padfone) where I could take one thing for overseas travel is really nice.

vi rocks by the way...works with literally any ascii terminal interface...

 

[Blazkowicz]

I hate this annoucement, because it provides almost no technical details and only has a bunch of PR material mostly.
A lot of consumer-targetted bullshit with pretty pictures and formatting, it looks like an Apple website but nothing about APIs, what sits on top of linux. Does it use X11, Wayland or something else, does it have GNU, does it have similarity to a regular ubuntu distro (i.e. has apt-get for instance, some common daemons and init system..)

Also, what's the history of this project and why does it come out of surprise?
Contrast with the Firefox OS annoucement that gave us some details, and the project being known for like two years (as Boot2Gecko)

They say this when you follow some link (does the mention of QML mean the GUI uses Qt?)

For rich applications with gorgeous movement and transitions, and graphics-heavy games, Ubuntu provides an amazing native developer environment. It uses QML to give you a really slick, easy development experience for native apps with engines in C or C++, and JavaScript for UI glue that isn’t performance critical. We also give you full native OpenGL, which the top games companies are using to make incredible games.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Android, Tizen, webOS, Mozilla are all based on the phone as a glorified web browser (i.e. Java VM or html5 engines). Ubuntu can certainly run a Java app or html5 app, but it also has direct, low-level access and Qt which means faster execution and lower memory footprints for apps. It also means one could have a single device as both phone and primary computer (think Asus Padfone but with a real, desktop OS inside).

I think you're misrepresenting at least Android, first it can run native code and second Java is not a web thing at all and not that slow. Java can run at a decent speed, it got a bad press in the 90s because the VM was slow to load and the other aspects were worse than today but it's way closer to native performance than doing javascript. (Should I mention that java and javascript are totally unrelated?)

As far as I know Firefox OS is the outlier here, with the bold idea of doing everything with javascript. And javascript and html5 suck.. But I somewhat like the idea on some ground (Firefox OS will have the lowest footprint, i.e. lowest disk space and number of APIs and framework). Good enough for apps like calendars, note taking, contact list and stuff like ssh clients. As long as we get media players that uses the DSPs..

 

[rpg.314]

Speed wasn't the issue - app robustness was.
Working on a Powerpoint or Word doc doesn't require a hefty CPU (and we're talking Tegra 3 vs. Core2Duo which really aren't that far apart), but the functionality of the Android office suites is roughtly 1% of LibreOffice.

Want to open a Powerpoint, edit a drawing or a pasted excel graph, etc. etc.? Have fun on Android or iOS with that.

Then there is the "slowness" issue of running everything in a Java VM rather than as a native binary...

I think you are overestimating the slowness induced by Java VM, not that I have any kind of love for it. SW architecture matters a great deal. That's why iOS can get smooth-as-a-baby's-skin experience from a ~400MHz ARM6 + MBX gpu.

The verge people did a hands on and found Ubuntu to be laggy, FWIW. My guess would be that they just shrunk down unity to a phone. No wonder it was laggy.

 

[Mize]

True Java doesn't have to be slow, but I don't think too many people will claim it's as fast as native compiled code.

The Verge, however, was dead on in their speed article (speed to market article, not lag). They compared the Ubuntu announcement to webOS and MeeGo - two of the better conceptual OSes we've seen IMHO - and how their launch timeline killed them, in part out of failure to maintain momentum.

And Blaz, you're right about no specifics. He says, in the PR video, that it's a full Ubuntu OS, but that doesn't have to mean X11/gnome, etc. though he does claim the HMI is Unity.

FWIW I came to Android from webOS where I could open a shell and execute Linux commands or run a full linux chrooted if I wanted some other app. Kludgy but hints of what might be possible. Add to that HMI elements from webOS that seem obvious but have still not be copied (such as my ever-bitching-about two or more inputs to merely delete a junk email when webOS can delete from the notification) by other mainstream phone OSes...

I just tend to get encouraged, after seeing so much innovation come and die over the years (don't even get me started on NeXTStep and the horror of seeing it gobbled up by MacOS), when something a bit more open and less dependent upon commercial forces comes along like a full blown linux phone OS. But leave it to B3D to temper my optimism

 

[Blazkowicz]

BTW I bitched about the nature of the announcement, it's all we have now, but I actually think this Ubuntu can be a good thing
Even if there eventually are complaints about the GUI or some intrusive "partnership" I'm sure they won't stop you from modifying it or just choose to run other software (the GUI is software).

If I'm pleased about even Firefox OS I should be please about Ubuntu. Both use the Android kernel, i.e. the linux part of Android - so you can get the proprietary drivers needed for properly operating your phone.
I can imagine you even being able to dual boot them (or run one chrooted from another)

If this is as much a "real OS" as what can expect, for instance KDE Plasma Active could be run (assuming it's usable on 3 or 4"), and pretty much anything, pointless or not.

 

[rpg.314]

True Java doesn't have to be slow, but I don't think too many people will claim it's as fast as native compiled code.

The Verge, however, was dead on in their speed article (speed to market article, not lag). They compared the Ubuntu announcement to webOS and MeeGo - two of the better conceptual OSes we've seen IMHO - and how their launch timeline killed them, in part out of failure to maintain momentum.

Java is slower than C++. But it's fast enough that sw architecture matters a lot more.

I would love a Ubuntu based smartphone. But I don't expect RIM/firefoxos/tizen/bada/ubuntu etc. to amount to anything.

We'll have to see if WP will be the No.3.