8 ms·

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future. Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and towards more traditional market segments. I mourn the death of this innovative path. That said, hopefully this convergence with GNOME will eventually lead back to convergence...but for now that dream is dead it would seem.

bandrami 10y ago
Does anybody besides platform developers want a unified phone, tablet, and desktop experience? I certainly don't; it sounds like a very bad idea.
- sharun 10y ago
  Engineers overengineering things when they have no new ideas. That's the entire convergence story
- topranks 10y ago
  Phones are already damn powerful, and will get more so. Why should we all have to buy another completely separate computer if we want to use a mouse/keyboard/monitor, when we already have phones?
  - bandrami 10y ago
    You have that backwards: why should your phone present the same UI when it's plugged into a keyboard and mouse and when it's not docked?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Correct It makes no sense from an usability point of view It's like insisting on a steering wheel for a plane. Different means of interaction and limitations and use cases require different interfaces. Also the "Ubuntu on the phone thing", it seems they were doing it because of the wrong reasons (mainly "We like Linux") rather than focusing on the user and the ecosystem
noobermin 10y ago
I am sad too, in fact, a scan over the comments suggests we aren't so much in the minority. I think too that his conviction was right, it is merely possible that his strategy of going out on his own on Mir wasn't the right one. I'm not sure if going with Wayland will hamper the eventual convergence, but I doubt at this point we will see an open source convergence before we see one in proprietary form.
- dal 10y ago
  It's here already called the Samsung Dex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPegrUMXaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPegrUMXaA https://news.samsung.com/global/hands-on-8-galaxy-s8-features-you-should-know-about https://news.samsung.com/global/hands-on-8-galaxy-s8-feature...
  - AuthenticApe 10y ago
    Kudos to Samsung for the amazing efforts but DeX is far from open.
    - dal 10y ago
      Of course but I meant that the proprietary version was here.
      - WorldMaker 10y ago
        Then you can add Windows Continuum and whatever it was Motorola's project was called to the list.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    Literally a week ago. Could this be related to Shuttleworth backing down?
AtticusTheGreat 10y ago
As someone who applauds this pivot, I never saw much value in the whole convergence idea. Why would I want my laptop and phone to be the same device? This seems to follow the misguided idea in software that if two ideas are similar, just make a single generic idea that solves both problems. But then you get into leaky abstractions and have to make lots of sacrifices to get it working well for both use cases.
- javajosh 10y ago
  Application convergence already happens via the browser; this takes much wind out of the sails of OS convergence. However, it also means that browser focused OSes, ChromeBook and FireFoxOS, will probably be the ones to win, in the end.
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    I thought they cancelled FFOS, didn't they?
    - swift 10y ago
      They did, though of course it's open source and somebody else could pick it up and continue development if they so chose.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    Or WebView-based cross-platform toolkits will win, in the end. (Electron, Cordova, React Native) Given FirefoxOS is also retired and ChromeOS seems to be in the process of being replaced by or merged with Android, I figure the cross-platform toolkits are more likely to win than the browser OSes.
    - LoSboccacc 10y ago
      They share the browser limited performance and bring a load of issues with them, they're at best a way to work around browser -> sensor access and bypass the appstores barrier.
justinclift 10y ago
MaruOS might be interesting for you: http://maruos.com http://maruos.com https://github.com/maruos https://github.com/maruos Only the Nexus 5 and 7 are fully supported at present though.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Huh. I have a barely usable Nexus 7 2012. Might be worth getting a used Nexus 7 2013 in order to play with this.
rlpb 10y ago
I'm with you. I'd like a fully free software stack across my personal devices, and I also thought that Ubuntu had the best chance of achieving this. I think the issue is in a business model that would work for Canonical. OTOH, most of the hard work is done. My Ubuntu Phone mostly works. The stack is complete. I'd love to see interested people taking that code and keeping it going. I'd spend spare time on contributing if this were to happen. (I'm a Canonical employee and Ubuntu developer, but not on the convergence/desktop/phone side, and my opinions here are my own and not that of my employer)
- nthcolumn 10y ago
  A number of canonical employees here I note - OP included. So what's the mood like 'a zillion lines of code and four years later' internally? Does juju look like any better bet? Go on - we won't tell... ;)
  - slitaz 10y ago
    It looks like you also have a charisma at telling dad jokes.
    - nthcolumn 10y ago
      personally always preferred fvwm to unity...
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    And Wayland.. Wasn't it all because of phones and tablets?
    - stinkytaco 10y ago
      Wayland solves a number of other problems than phones and laptops. It modernizes code left over from the dumb terminal world. It also should be pointed out that the dream is not dead. Another project (hopefully Gnome) can pick this up, so the effort isn't lost.
driverdan 10y ago
While I agree it'd be nice to have Linux running on all the things I don't see the point of trying to make the interfaces the same. Each device is used differently and should have an interface that reflects the way it's used.
- avodonosov 10y ago
  While interfaces should not be the same across devices, being able to dock you phone and continue using its applications on normal monitor of your desktop, with keyboard and mouse would be convenient. I mean when you walk it's a phone, when you at the desk, the same device is connected to monitor, keyboard and mouse.
  - flukus 10y ago
    But then each application is essentially 2 applications in one.
    - yorwba 10y ago
      It's the same application, but with 2 different interfaces. Of course, a UI toolkit that can do "write once, interact in any way" would be helpful for the implementation.
      - flukus 10y ago
        Which is essentially two applications as I said. The only difference is that they may share some state, but there are other ways to handle that too.
    - Shorel 10y ago
      Just like any responsive website is.
      - flukus 10y ago
        So it's easy with what is essentially a document viewer, it's much harder when it comes to real apps, the desktop interface is dumbed down for the limitations of a phone.
systems 10y ago
the requirements for a good desktop interface is different from the requirements for a good phone interface and arguably different from the requirements for a good tablet interface size matters yes like you i believe one OS across all devices is a good idea, but the interface need to adapt to screen size, and provide a different and suitable experience for certain categories of screen sizes and different mode I believe a good option would have been to have a touch-mode and a desk-mode (desk mode being a more traditional task bar desktop UI) anyway, it is really weird they didnt see this, with all the talent they have and the resources they had, but, they failed, so they were wrong Someone else will try and will succeed, because yes, one OS experience across all devices is still a very good idea .. we just need someone to execute it better
- onli 10y ago
  I don't really see why there are comments like this in this thread. Obviously they need to have a different UI, but Ubuntu Touch already offered a different UI depending on what it was running on. Or at least that was the idea. See the animation on https://www.ubuntu.com/mobile https://www.ubuntu.com/mobile. No one was trying to make a one-size-fits-all UI.
- petecox 10y ago
  Windows? Microsoft are pushing ahead with development of UWP and Continuum, with the creator's update due in 3 weeks - despite no new Lumias. At least one third party is still keeping the dream alive with a crowd-funded WP10 phone announced this past week: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cerulean-moment-smartphone-for-windows-phone-fans#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cerulean-moment-smartphon...
  - int_19h 10y ago
    It's an interesting device, but I think it's going to be a dead-end because of ARM. The moment someone makes a phone that runs one of those Intel mobile chipsets, which can actually run x64 version of Windows, and all the existing apps, is the moment when I'll buy into that "it's a smartphone! it's a desktop! it's both!" line. But not before.
justicezyx 10y ago
No! Convergence and ramification are the cycling nature of any system's evolution path. Not just convergence.
daveguy 10y ago
data convergence is the future, not interface convergence. I think they made a serious mistake conflating the two. You should be able to shift your view of a document from a desktop to a laptop, but that doesn't mean the fundamental interface from one should be shoe-horned into the other. That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked.
- bhauer 10y ago
  Agreed. Incidentally, what you describe as data convergence is part of a theoretical computing model I call PAO: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
- bazinga888 10y ago
  > That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked. At least in the demos I saw, the mobile UI would turn into a traditional Ubuntu Unity look, with floating windows and keyboard+mouse interaction. So it sounds like they were working in the direction you describe. The dumbest move, IMO, was not using Wayland and working with that dev community to improve it's functionality on mobile (one of the reasons given for Mir). Shuttleworth seems to point this out in the post. Turns out rolling yet another display server rankles noses and takes a lot of dev cycles.
- flukus 10y ago
  We have a solution for data convergence, SD cards.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    You mean dropbox.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Yeah, that's good for a lot of people too. Github/Gitlab is great for software projects. I have rsync for my music collection, etc.
avian 10y ago
Convergence already means that GNOME on my (quite un-rotatable) desktop PC has a rotate-lock button and that I have to do an awkward slide-to-unlock gesture with a mouse to get to the login screen. No thanks.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- azdle 10y ago
  Just FYI, if you hit enter or just start typing your password the lock screen slides away. Or at least it does on Fedora, but I can't imagine that's anything customized.
  - jhasse 10y ago
    Also works in Ubuntu.
pmontra 10y ago
I'm for device convergence, a small phone as powerful as a current pro laptop. We're still not there and the battery would be a problem too. The interfaces for the phone mode and the laptop mode could be very different, no problem with that. With that in mind I welcome this move from Canonical. Converging on the same stack as everybody else is going to be good for the Linux desktop. I'm not worried anymore about compatibility issues, Mir and Wayland. When the phone form factor will be able to fit enough computing power to be also a laptop, we'll find a way to design the appropriate UI. However note that with a fast and responsive network connection we could use phones as dumb terminals to remote processing power, so maybe that will be the solution to convergence.
- stock_toaster 10y ago
  I agree. I think once (if/when) we ever get next gen battery tech, we may start seeing more things changing.
shmerl 10y ago
Convergence doesn't need to go away. KDE project for example put some effort in making common components[1]. It's just that Canonical's methods of handling it went completely off on a tangent with reinventing the wheel (Mir instead of Wayland and so on). So it's not surprising, they finally realized the huge complexity of that task, and inability to do it alone. No one stops others contributing to projects which still work on convergence, but use shared stack at the same time. 1. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Convergence_Overview https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Convergence_Overview
int_19h 10y ago
It's not that convergence is useless per se - indeed, the fact that both Windows and Android keep trying indicates that it's desirable. But I think that any hope that this could come from the desktop Linux world, and be successful, was misguided, for the same reason why "Linux on the desktop" never happened at large scale (to all the people who are about to respond "it happened for me": sure, and I'm well aware of that - but that's not what the phrase actually ever meant, and we all know that). This is an even bigger problem with phones, because with the PC ecosystem, at least you can go around shopping for an alternative OS relatively easily, and common hardware is relatively open spec-wise. So something that has 1% market share on the desktop, will probably have an order of magnitude less on mobile. On top of that, it's not enough to implement the base system. You also have to maintain it long-term, to port existing apps to it or write new ones, and to maintain those. Within the OSS model, maintainers are generally users. So the maintenance burden is high enough for desktop Linux as it is (because of relatively fewer devs/users, compared to OS X and Windows) - and then you throw mobile into the mix, which is an even smaller group. I just don't think it can work at that small of a scale.
- topranks 10y ago
  Spot on, these were the major challenges that always faced the idea. Interesting to see the latest Samsung phones doing the same thing, but running Android and having Samsung behind it that attempt is much more likely to bear fruit. Fair play to Cannonical & Shuttleworth for giving it a try, but widespread adoption was always a pipe dream I think.
teekert 10y ago
I agree, I was really looking forward to it. Imho the mistake was to partner with Meizu and BQ whereas distribiting images (at least to start with) for the Pixel/Nexus line phones would have been more effective. That way people could have put their toe in the Ubuntu Phone water before committing. I donated to the dev that was working on the OnePlus 3 port, I was really looking forward to it, it could have been my next laptop (if only the OP3 would have supported HDMI via the USB3 port or MiraCast.)
jholman 10y ago
I agree about the intuition about convergence, and I'm not at all persuaded about the comments that "we want data convergence but not device convergence". I think that without device convergence, we'll see the desktop continue to become marginalized. And I agree about Ubuntu, and thus Unity, looking like the best shot for a free software unified OS. But none of that was gonna make me use Unity on my Linux desktops. shrug
mrmondo 10y ago
You're not, I don't like Ubuntu as a distro as I believe they've put testing and security in a back seat, but the one thing I really was excited about was the convergence of mobile and desktop, it seems like the future to me and it's something I've wanted since my first smart phone.
mangecoeur 10y ago
I personally really liked Unity, and I was following Unity8 development for a long time so I'm genuinely disappointed to see it go - partly because I really thought it could shape up to something really cool and partly because as you say, the convergence dream is basically dead, as is any realistic future of Ubuntu on touch devices. I know Gnome has for ages built features with some theoretical touch device in mind, but only Canonical/Ubuntu has ever shipped remotely viable touch based hardware.

bandrami 10y ago

Does anybody besides platform developers want a unified phone, tablet, and desktop experience? I certainly don't; it sounds like a very bad idea.

sharun 10y ago
Engineers overengineering things when they have no new ideas. That's the entire convergence story
topranks 10y ago
Phones are already damn powerful, and will get more so. Why should we all have to buy another completely separate computer if we want to use a mouse/keyboard/monitor, when we already have phones?
- bandrami 10y ago
  You have that backwards: why should your phone present the same UI when it's plugged into a keyboard and mouse and when it's not docked?
raverbashing 10y ago
Correct It makes no sense from an usability point of view It's like insisting on a steering wheel for a plane. Different means of interaction and limitations and use cases require different interfaces. Also the "Ubuntu on the phone thing", it seems they were doing it because of the wrong reasons (mainly "We like Linux") rather than focusing on the user and the ecosystem

noobermin 10y ago

I am sad too, in fact, a scan over the comments suggests we aren't so much in the minority. I think too that his conviction was right, it is merely possible that his strategy of going out on his own on Mir wasn't the right one. I'm not sure if going with Wayland will hamper the eventual convergence, but I doubt at this point we will see an open source convergence before we see one in proprietary form.

dal 10y ago
It's here already called the Samsung Dex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPegrUMXaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPegrUMXaA https://news.samsung.com/global/hands-on-8-galaxy-s8-features-you-should-know-about https://news.samsung.com/global/hands-on-8-galaxy-s8-feature...
- AuthenticApe 10y ago
  Kudos to Samsung for the amazing efforts but DeX is far from open.
  - dal 10y ago
    Of course but I meant that the proprietary version was here.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      Then you can add Windows Continuum and whatever it was Motorola's project was called to the list.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Literally a week ago. Could this be related to Shuttleworth backing down?

AtticusTheGreat 10y ago

As someone who applauds this pivot, I never saw much value in the whole convergence idea. Why would I want my laptop and phone to be the same device? This seems to follow the misguided idea in software that if two ideas are similar, just make a single generic idea that solves both problems. But then you get into leaky abstractions and have to make lots of sacrifices to get it working well for both use cases.

javajosh 10y ago
Application convergence already happens via the browser; this takes much wind out of the sails of OS convergence. However, it also means that browser focused OSes, ChromeBook and FireFoxOS, will probably be the ones to win, in the end.
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  I thought they cancelled FFOS, didn't they?
  - swift 10y ago
    They did, though of course it's open source and somebody else could pick it up and continue development if they so chose.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Or WebView-based cross-platform toolkits will win, in the end. (Electron, Cordova, React Native) Given FirefoxOS is also retired and ChromeOS seems to be in the process of being replaced by or merged with Android, I figure the cross-platform toolkits are more likely to win than the browser OSes.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    They share the browser limited performance and bring a load of issues with them, they're at best a way to work around browser -> sensor access and bypass the appstores barrier.

justinclift 10y ago

MaruOS might be interesting for you: http://maruos.com http://maruos.com https://github.com/maruos https://github.com/maruos Only the Nexus 5 and 7 are fully supported at present though.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
NoGravitas 10y ago
Huh. I have a barely usable Nexus 7 2012. Might be worth getting a used Nexus 7 2013 in order to play with this.

rlpb 10y ago

I'm with you. I'd like a fully free software stack across my personal devices, and I also thought that Ubuntu had the best chance of achieving this. I think the issue is in a business model that would work for Canonical. OTOH, most of the hard work is done. My Ubuntu Phone mostly works. The stack is complete. I'd love to see interested people taking that code and keeping it going. I'd spend spare time on contributing if this were to happen. (I'm a Canonical employee and Ubuntu developer, but not on the convergence/desktop/phone side, and my opinions here are my own and not that of my employer)

nthcolumn 10y ago
A number of canonical employees here I note - OP included. So what's the mood like 'a zillion lines of code and four years later' internally? Does juju look like any better bet? Go on - we won't tell... ;)
- slitaz 10y ago
  It looks like you also have a charisma at telling dad jokes.
  - nthcolumn 10y ago
    personally always preferred fvwm to unity...
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  And Wayland.. Wasn't it all because of phones and tablets?
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    Wayland solves a number of other problems than phones and laptops. It modernizes code left over from the dumb terminal world. It also should be pointed out that the dream is not dead. Another project (hopefully Gnome) can pick this up, so the effort isn't lost.

driverdan 10y ago

While I agree it'd be nice to have Linux running on all the things I don't see the point of trying to make the interfaces the same. Each device is used differently and should have an interface that reflects the way it's used.

avodonosov 10y ago
While interfaces should not be the same across devices, being able to dock you phone and continue using its applications on normal monitor of your desktop, with keyboard and mouse would be convenient. I mean when you walk it's a phone, when you at the desk, the same device is connected to monitor, keyboard and mouse.
- flukus 10y ago
  But then each application is essentially 2 applications in one.
  - yorwba 10y ago
    It's the same application, but with 2 different interfaces. Of course, a UI toolkit that can do "write once, interact in any way" would be helpful for the implementation.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Which is essentially two applications as I said. The only difference is that they may share some state, but there are other ways to handle that too.
  - Shorel 10y ago
    Just like any responsive website is.
    - flukus 10y ago
      So it's easy with what is essentially a document viewer, it's much harder when it comes to real apps, the desktop interface is dumbed down for the limitations of a phone.

systems 10y ago

the requirements for a good desktop interface is different from the requirements for a good phone interface and arguably different from the requirements for a good tablet interface size matters yes like you i believe one OS across all devices is a good idea, but the interface need to adapt to screen size, and provide a different and suitable experience for certain categories of screen sizes and different mode I believe a good option would have been to have a touch-mode and a desk-mode (desk mode being a more traditional task bar desktop UI) anyway, it is really weird they didnt see this, with all the talent they have and the resources they had, but, they failed, so they were wrong Someone else will try and will succeed, because yes, one OS experience across all devices is still a very good idea .. we just need someone to execute it better

onli 10y ago
I don't really see why there are comments like this in this thread. Obviously they need to have a different UI, but Ubuntu Touch already offered a different UI depending on what it was running on. Or at least that was the idea. See the animation on https://www.ubuntu.com/mobile https://www.ubuntu.com/mobile. No one was trying to make a one-size-fits-all UI.
petecox 10y ago
Windows? Microsoft are pushing ahead with development of UWP and Continuum, with the creator's update due in 3 weeks - despite no new Lumias. At least one third party is still keeping the dream alive with a crowd-funded WP10 phone announced this past week: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cerulean-moment-smartphone-for-windows-phone-fans#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cerulean-moment-smartphon...
- int_19h 10y ago
  It's an interesting device, but I think it's going to be a dead-end because of ARM. The moment someone makes a phone that runs one of those Intel mobile chipsets, which can actually run x64 version of Windows, and all the existing apps, is the moment when I'll buy into that "it's a smartphone! it's a desktop! it's both!" line. But not before.

justicezyx 10y ago

No! Convergence and ramification are the cycling nature of any system's evolution path. Not just convergence.

daveguy 10y ago

data convergence is the future, not interface convergence. I think they made a serious mistake conflating the two. You should be able to shift your view of a document from a desktop to a laptop, but that doesn't mean the fundamental interface from one should be shoe-horned into the other. That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked.

bhauer 10y ago
Agreed. Incidentally, what you describe as data convergence is part of a theoretical computing model I call PAO: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
bazinga888 10y ago
> That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked. At least in the demos I saw, the mobile UI would turn into a traditional Ubuntu Unity look, with floating windows and keyboard+mouse interaction. So it sounds like they were working in the direction you describe. The dumbest move, IMO, was not using Wayland and working with that dev community to improve it's functionality on mobile (one of the reasons given for Mir). Shuttleworth seems to point this out in the post. Turns out rolling yet another display server rankles noses and takes a lot of dev cycles.
flukus 10y ago
We have a solution for data convergence, SD cards.
- ralfd 10y ago
  You mean dropbox.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Yeah, that's good for a lot of people too. Github/Gitlab is great for software projects. I have rsync for my music collection, etc.

avian 10y ago

Convergence already means that GNOME on my (quite un-rotatable) desktop PC has a rotate-lock button and that I have to do an awkward slide-to-unlock gesture with a mouse to get to the login screen. No thanks.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
azdle 10y ago
Just FYI, if you hit enter or just start typing your password the lock screen slides away. Or at least it does on Fedora, but I can't imagine that's anything customized.
- jhasse 10y ago
  Also works in Ubuntu.

pmontra 10y ago

I'm for device convergence, a small phone as powerful as a current pro laptop. We're still not there and the battery would be a problem too. The interfaces for the phone mode and the laptop mode could be very different, no problem with that. With that in mind I welcome this move from Canonical. Converging on the same stack as everybody else is going to be good for the Linux desktop. I'm not worried anymore about compatibility issues, Mir and Wayland. When the phone form factor will be able to fit enough computing power to be also a laptop, we'll find a way to design the appropriate UI. However note that with a fast and responsive network connection we could use phones as dumb terminals to remote processing power, so maybe that will be the solution to convergence.

stock_toaster 10y ago
I agree. I think once (if/when) we ever get next gen battery tech, we may start seeing more things changing.

shmerl 10y ago

Convergence doesn't need to go away. KDE project for example put some effort in making common components[1]. It's just that Canonical's methods of handling it went completely off on a tangent with reinventing the wheel (Mir instead of Wayland and so on). So it's not surprising, they finally realized the huge complexity of that task, and inability to do it alone. No one stops others contributing to projects which still work on convergence, but use shared stack at the same time. 1. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Convergence_Overview https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Convergence_Overview

int_19h 10y ago

It's not that convergence is useless per se - indeed, the fact that both Windows and Android keep trying indicates that it's desirable. But I think that any hope that this could come from the desktop Linux world, and be successful, was misguided, for the same reason why "Linux on the desktop" never happened at large scale (to all the people who are about to respond "it happened for me": sure, and I'm well aware of that - but that's not what the phrase actually ever meant, and we all know that). This is an even bigger problem with phones, because with the PC ecosystem, at least you can go around shopping for an alternative OS relatively easily, and common hardware is relatively open spec-wise. So something that has 1% market share on the desktop, will probably have an order of magnitude less on mobile. On top of that, it's not enough to implement the base system. You also have to maintain it long-term, to port existing apps to it or write new ones, and to maintain those. Within the OSS model, maintainers are generally users. So the maintenance burden is high enough for desktop Linux as it is (because of relatively fewer devs/users, compared to OS X and Windows) - and then you throw mobile into the mix, which is an even smaller group. I just don't think it can work at that small of a scale.

topranks 10y ago
Spot on, these were the major challenges that always faced the idea. Interesting to see the latest Samsung phones doing the same thing, but running Android and having Samsung behind it that attempt is much more likely to bear fruit. Fair play to Cannonical & Shuttleworth for giving it a try, but widespread adoption was always a pipe dream I think.

teekert 10y ago

I agree, I was really looking forward to it. Imho the mistake was to partner with Meizu and BQ whereas distribiting images (at least to start with) for the Pixel/Nexus line phones would have been more effective. That way people could have put their toe in the Ubuntu Phone water before committing. I donated to the dev that was working on the OnePlus 3 port, I was really looking forward to it, it could have been my next laptop (if only the OP3 would have supported HDMI via the USB3 port or MiraCast.)

jholman 10y ago

I agree about the intuition about convergence, and I'm not at all persuaded about the comments that "we want data convergence but not device convergence". I think that without device convergence, we'll see the desktop continue to become marginalized. And I agree about Ubuntu, and thus Unity, looking like the best shot for a free software unified OS. But none of that was gonna make me use Unity on my Linux desktops. shrug

mrmondo 10y ago

You're not, I don't like Ubuntu as a distro as I believe they've put testing and security in a back seat, but the one thing I really was excited about was the convergence of mobile and desktop, it seems like the future to me and it's something I've wanted since my first smart phone.

mangecoeur 10y ago

I personally really liked Unity, and I was following Unity8 development for a long time so I'm genuinely disappointed to see it go - partly because I really thought it could shape up to something really cool and partly because as you say, the convergence dream is basically dead, as is any realistic future of Ubuntu on touch devices. I know Gnome has for ages built features with some theoretical touch device in mind, but only Canonical/Ubuntu has ever shipped remotely viable touch based hardware.