MWC: Ubuntu booth - Unity 8

[suicidalfranco]

Hate change? Good! Cause Unity 8 is coming and it brings a butt load of change compared to the Unity introduced far back in the Ubuntu Remix days (for those that weren't there Ubuntu Remix was the release introduced specifically for netbooks, and brought with it the launcher and dash that will later evolve into what have today)

And what an evolution it id, from this:

to ths:

 

 

At MWC, the good people at xda gave a visit to the orange booth and got a tour of Ubuntu Touch in it's most recent state, convergence and Unity 8 that has been in the works for the past 4 years, ever since the introduction of the Ubuntu Touch concept and the Ubuntu Edge indiegogo caapaign. The video shows off a revamped app switcher, a new workspace manager, a drop down indicator panel, side-stage or has i like to call it: the retarded way to have two apps open side by side, the ability on a tablet to switch from tablet mode to desktop mode at the flip of a switch,

We also get a demonstration of convergence from the phone, and best phrase of all: "Any app that run on Linux will run on this", yes my friends, no need to rewrite apps and make them available exclusively on the Ubuntu Software Center (or whatever it's going to be renamed), and notice that all this is running on the 3 year old Nexus 4 and with LibreOffice running we can tell that there is still support for x11 (by the theme, still in early stage though). You can use keyboard and mouse just the phone which will act as a trackpad and also keyboard when prompt to input text.

 

My take on all this: outside of side-stage, FREAKIN', BALLZ TO THE WALLZ, AMAZING! Ubuntu has always been my goto OS whenever i get sick and tired of Windows, when to much thinking gets involved in Arch or when i get bored of Fedora's no-proprietary software attitude. Even when for no reasons at all it loads up the GPU driver after i most definitely blacklisted it  i sticked with it. If someone at Canonical ever reads this: please, please, please, please, pleeeeeaaaaaase, get HP to give you the documentation for the X3 so that it can, hopefully, get a port; that would make my day shine for a thousand years!

 

It has been a long run ever since this:

[QueenDemetria]

Nice

[f22luke]

Ooooh one plus one support now that has my attention.

[Misanthrope]

Ubuntu: stop trying to be a phone OS, it's never gonna happen.

[spartaman64]

3 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Ubuntu: stop trying to be a phone OS, it's never gonna happen.

windows phones prove otherwise even if its not a lot of adoption there are still some

[f22luke]

1 hour ago, Misanthrope said:

Ubuntu: stop trying to be a phone OS, it's never gonna happen.

If anyone has a chance Conical does and to be honest I would love to see a true open source OS take over.  ATM I like the tablet they were showing off that could give them more market share if they just targeted the tablet space.

 

1 hour ago, spartaman64 said:

windows phones prove otherwise even if its not a lot of adoption there are still some

It's kinda neat that just as we see rumors of a Windows continuum device Ubuntu comes out and reminds us that they did it first.

[Nowak]

They didn't address one pretty important thing: HiDPI support. People love high density displays on phones and tablets, and GTK+ and Qt still have awful scaling support. Even Windows scales better, and that's saying a lot because not a whole lot of Win32 applications scale well.

[Albatross]

It is always fantastic to see Ubuntu news. And holy hell! It looks nice too! I really love how you can swipe the launcher into view just like the desktop, and the Convergence thing is NICE.

 

I want a Ubuntu phone so bad.

[zMeul]

I hated Ubuntu ever since they pushed that touch UI, Unity, to a desktop - just no! seem they didn't learned anything with W8 doing the same thing

 

using Lubuntu and if they don't fuck something up, not going to switch

[Misanthrope]

3 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

windows phones prove otherwise even if its not a lot of adoption there are still some

By sucking and having close to 0 market share? And it only took fucking MICROSOFT to get to that point, I'm sure Ubuntu will overtake iOS and Android quickly!

[Guest]

He keeps saying that the phone can run anything a desktop can.

Does Microsoft offer Skype for Linux compiled for ARM? I don't think they do. I don't think any of the phone chips have any virtualization support either. Oh and all the Steam games and the Steam client itself are x86 only.

And I guess people who are considering Ubuntu phones understand that implicitly, but still.

[deviant88]

100 unity's later still no working audio/video drivers wohooo linux 

[spartaman64]

6 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

By sucking and having close to 0 market share? And it only took fucking MICROSOFT to get to that point, I'm sure Ubuntu will overtake iOS and Android quickly!

the point is not to gain more market share than android. the point is fulfilling a niche market. 

[Misanthrope]

2 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

the point is not to gain more market share than android. the point is fulfilling a niche market. 

Nerds that want to use a phone as a full PC? Yeah Microsoft it's actually doing that too now.