6 ms·

They lost the one factor that was truly differentiating. Arguably, it was the reason we got so excited the first time around. I feel as though the entire marke

They lost the one factor that was truly differentiating. Arguably, it was the reason we got so excited the first time around. I feel as though the entire market is screaming for something obvious to exist. It's so obvious, so compelling, so useful... And so far away. Why do we even have "desktops" and "laptops" and "phones" and "tablets" and "wearable watches" and so forth? Actually, the rise of the wearable watch gives us the biggest clue: it's because we care about form factors. When I'm on the subway, I want something to hold in my hand. When I'm in a big hurry or on a jog, I want to glance at something on my wrist. When I'm in bed but don't want to disturb my partner, I want to interact with a larger yet personal tablet. When I want to type something (including code) or interact with content in more involved ways, I want something with a mouse and a keyboard. When I want to have a state of the art immersion experience, I want something with a lot of horsepower (and preferably a head mounted display of some sort). Why do I have to have different computers for all of this when all I want is different I/O modalities (and related computing expansion devices)? Why do we keep ignoring the fact that what we want is the ability to experience our virtual world in the input / output environment that suits us at this moment? Everything else is secondary. I was so excited when the original Ubuntu Edge was announced, because I felt that FINALLY someone had figured out how to make the thing we've all been screaming for. But now I'm not so sure Canonical really "got it" after all. If they did, it would have been the first feature they kept, not the first one they cut. To even call it a "feature" is diminutive. It's a paradigm that wants to exist. We've seen already with the Motorola Atrix that it's harder than it sounds to get this right. But why is it THIS hard? Why can't we start with a phone that can be the CPU for wearables and tablets, and that can dock into a higher horsepower "GPU station" with a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor when we need it? You don't have to nail the performance profile as much as you have to nail why the experience is obviously better. I argue that you don't need a supercomputer in your pocket to pull that off. Is it just me on this, or what?

killface 12y ago
You've basically described the Star Trek universe...
Scorponok 12y ago
We're getting close to this - you can buy graphics cards that plug into a PCI Express port on a laptop, for example. But the hardware's not quite there yet.
untog 12y ago
But why is it THIS hard? Batteries. Running a full Ubuntu OS on a smartphone battery would result in the battery draining quickly. So instead you'd need some sort of dual boot phone OS and desktop OS system that shares data... it's far from simple.
- breckinloggins 12y ago
  One OS should suffice. Driving a desktop monitor and powering desktop app features while still on battery would certainly drain battery life, so don't do that. Plug it in. The OS and apps will morph to the I/O and power class it has access to (we already have power-stepping processors... it can't be that far-fetched). Also, from this whole argument it simply doesn't follow that one OS can't scale from IoT to mega-servers. It's just code. Not all of it has to be running all the time. Not all services have to be proffered at the same time. We can do that. It may not look like "Ubuntu desktop OS on a phone", but maybe it shouldn't. That's probably the wrong direction.
  - spiralpolitik 12y ago
    Wasn't that one of the selling points of micro kernels ? Small Kernel that starts and stops servers as needed depending on the circumstances.
    - breckinloggins 12y ago
      Yes. Turns out the cost of context switches quickly overran the benefits of this approach, but things are slowly getting better. L4 is one approach. The library-OS approach (where apps run directly on virtualized hardware with a minimal OS) are another.
- e12e 12y ago
  This must be some strange definition of OS. Phones already run on a Linux kernel - and are already capable of running a GNU/Ubuntu yserland in parallel with an Android userland. Clearly the Android userland works quite well for mobile use, and the desktop userland could work quite well for docked use. It seems odd to claim that the two modes of userland couldn't be more tightly coupled (allowing a single app to expose multiple UIs, like a browswr exposes both a command line interface (firefox www.google.com) and a GUI?
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
I think you might be mixing together the problem and one possible solution. People definitely want to be able to use different form factors in different places. One way to do that would be to carry around a central GPU+Memory store. Another would be different devices interconnected through a network - and the world that's being made is the latter. Right now I can leave off in the middle of an ebook on my tablet and pick up at the same spot on my phone (Kindle). Same with videos from my TV to my phone/tablet/computer (Plex). It gets a little trickier with development environments, but if I was sufficiently motivated I could do everything in a VPS that I accessed remotely, or use Nitrous.io to get a web accessible IDE (though I'm not sure about using a watch for programming). I think this is mostly prompted by the fact that on the hardware side - everything is very custom and tailored to that form factor (to keep size and weight down, we've got all these systems on a chip and custom shaped batteries).
- freehunter 12y ago
  There was the guy a while back who wrote a pretty high-profile rundown of why he liked coding on an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard, using vim and Linode. There's also Cloud9 that has support for quite a bit more development environments than Nitrous has. Coding in the cloud can be done, and for some needs, can be done quite well.
cwyers 12y ago
"Why can't we start with a phone that can be the CPU for wearables and tablets, and that can dock into a higher horsepower 'GPU station' with a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor when we need it?" Because a full-on SoC costs somewhere between $20 and $30? It costs almost nothing to add a full computer to any tablet/laptop form factor phone dock.
dharma1 12y ago
the convergence thing? It's coming. Soon :)
- joelthelion 12y ago
  I think you need to say a little more :)
asdrty 12y ago
a combination of widi/miracast,bluetooth,wifi,etc can achieve alot of that goal but it needs to get easier to use still
slgeorge 12y ago
The capabilities for converged devices are getting closer. Will's video (lower down) shows some of the latest software developments. You shouldn't be discouraged - it's on the way - but there is a reason that the major players have two OS platforms! It's a hard software problem to solve. You have to create a full stack that will work across both device form-factors and the variety of use-cases that both supports. The Ubuntu Edge campaign was aimed at trying to accelerate hardware innovation for those that wanted convergence faster. We didn't make it - but it will still happen. Separate to convergence, the "next billion" devices are mobile in some form. Ubuntu's goal is to be the free software platform available to everyone [0]. That's why we're creating a first-class phone experience. And there's still lots of room for innovation in what phones can do and how they can be central to people's lives. So the point of today is shipping the first Ubuntu phones to users. I'm really looking forward to how people use, enjoy and develop with them. [0] http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu
harel 12y ago
Not just you. I'm on the same waiting list. I'll take it a step further. I want like you said, my mobile device to also be my main and only computer. When I place it near a monitor, I want it to spark into 'computer' mode. When I pull out a keyboard from my bag and place it near the phone - it should work. Same with the mouse. And it should function and operate with comparable performance to a regular laptop. I don't think this is too much to ask for. After all, I'm not asking for a battery that lasts all day am I?
krick 12y ago
I'm sure it's not just you, and people approve, but I do not. In fact, all I want is actual GNU/Linux on the mobile device, which boils down to native DM, which is usable with touchscreen and having nice API + drivers. Everything else will come. Something like that Nokia N900 with updated hardware would do just fine. (Well, almost). I don't need it to be "one environment for all devices" — in fact, I think it's pretty horrible idea, because what I need with keyboard and a couple of 24" monitors is far from what I need on 4.3" touchscreen (and neither is "Unity", btw). I just want my familiar OS with standard messaging services and daemons, that I can make do what I want by writing plain shellscript, and not some Java-framework with half-proprietary firmware on most devices, developed by some evil corporation, which makes money by advertising and spying on its users. So, well, what I need is not complicated (pretty much the opposite), but it requires "doing things right" and this is always incredibly hard. Essentially, to make proper DM it would require to hire someone, who already has written a couple of DMs which were used widely enough for mistakes made while inventing its API to become obvious. Unlikely that somebody, who isn't spying on his users would want to invest in something that big. And, furthermore, obviously there is much more people, who need Angry Birds, than people, who need transparent process interoperation.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Why do I have to have different computers for all of this when all I want is different I/O modalities (and related computing expansion devices)? Why do we keep ignoring the fact that what we want is the ability to experience our virtual world in the input / output environment that suits us at this moment? Everything else is secondary. AFAICT, because hardware makers determine the operating-system market rather than the other way around. I dreamed of a more modernized, Plan 9-like OS to ~~tie all devices together~~ RULE THEM ALL back in freshman year of college. It's simply the obvious thing to do if you're a user and enough of an OS geek to understand the idea. But, well, we softies don't drive those markets. We could never get the effort together to produce an operating system that would both support (via hardware drivers) and be supported by (in the sense of not having to crack open your phone with a screwdriver to install the thing) all the necessary hardware platforms.

killface 12y ago

You've basically described the Star Trek universe...

Scorponok 12y ago

We're getting close to this - you can buy graphics cards that plug into a PCI Express port on a laptop, for example. But the hardware's not quite there yet.

untog 12y ago

But why is it THIS hard? Batteries. Running a full Ubuntu OS on a smartphone battery would result in the battery draining quickly. So instead you'd need some sort of dual boot phone OS and desktop OS system that shares data... it's far from simple.

breckinloggins 12y ago
One OS should suffice. Driving a desktop monitor and powering desktop app features while still on battery would certainly drain battery life, so don't do that. Plug it in. The OS and apps will morph to the I/O and power class it has access to (we already have power-stepping processors... it can't be that far-fetched). Also, from this whole argument it simply doesn't follow that one OS can't scale from IoT to mega-servers. It's just code. Not all of it has to be running all the time. Not all services have to be proffered at the same time. We can do that. It may not look like "Ubuntu desktop OS on a phone", but maybe it shouldn't. That's probably the wrong direction.
- spiralpolitik 12y ago
  Wasn't that one of the selling points of micro kernels ? Small Kernel that starts and stops servers as needed depending on the circumstances.
  - breckinloggins 12y ago
    Yes. Turns out the cost of context switches quickly overran the benefits of this approach, but things are slowly getting better. L4 is one approach. The library-OS approach (where apps run directly on virtualized hardware with a minimal OS) are another.
e12e 12y ago
This must be some strange definition of OS. Phones already run on a Linux kernel - and are already capable of running a GNU/Ubuntu yserland in parallel with an Android userland. Clearly the Android userland works quite well for mobile use, and the desktop userland could work quite well for docked use. It seems odd to claim that the two modes of userland couldn't be more tightly coupled (allowing a single app to expose multiple UIs, like a browswr exposes both a command line interface (firefox www.google.com) and a GUI?

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

I think you might be mixing together the problem and one possible solution. People definitely want to be able to use different form factors in different places. One way to do that would be to carry around a central GPU+Memory store. Another would be different devices interconnected through a network - and the world that's being made is the latter. Right now I can leave off in the middle of an ebook on my tablet and pick up at the same spot on my phone (Kindle). Same with videos from my TV to my phone/tablet/computer (Plex). It gets a little trickier with development environments, but if I was sufficiently motivated I could do everything in a VPS that I accessed remotely, or use Nitrous.io to get a web accessible IDE (though I'm not sure about using a watch for programming). I think this is mostly prompted by the fact that on the hardware side - everything is very custom and tailored to that form factor (to keep size and weight down, we've got all these systems on a chip and custom shaped batteries).

freehunter 12y ago
There was the guy a while back who wrote a pretty high-profile rundown of why he liked coding on an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard, using vim and Linode. There's also Cloud9 that has support for quite a bit more development environments than Nitrous has. Coding in the cloud can be done, and for some needs, can be done quite well.

cwyers 12y ago

"Why can't we start with a phone that can be the CPU for wearables and tablets, and that can dock into a higher horsepower 'GPU station' with a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor when we need it?" Because a full-on SoC costs somewhere between $20 and $30? It costs almost nothing to add a full computer to any tablet/laptop form factor phone dock.

dharma1 12y ago

the convergence thing? It's coming. Soon :)

joelthelion 12y ago
I think you need to say a little more :)

asdrty 12y ago

a combination of widi/miracast,bluetooth,wifi,etc can achieve alot of that goal but it needs to get easier to use still

slgeorge 12y ago

The capabilities for converged devices are getting closer. Will's video (lower down) shows some of the latest software developments. You shouldn't be discouraged - it's on the way - but there is a reason that the major players have two OS platforms! It's a hard software problem to solve. You have to create a full stack that will work across both device form-factors and the variety of use-cases that both supports. The Ubuntu Edge campaign was aimed at trying to accelerate hardware innovation for those that wanted convergence faster. We didn't make it - but it will still happen. Separate to convergence, the "next billion" devices are mobile in some form. Ubuntu's goal is to be the free software platform available to everyone [0]. That's why we're creating a first-class phone experience. And there's still lots of room for innovation in what phones can do and how they can be central to people's lives. So the point of today is shipping the first Ubuntu phones to users. I'm really looking forward to how people use, enjoy and develop with them. [0] http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu

harel 12y ago

Not just you. I'm on the same waiting list. I'll take it a step further. I want like you said, my mobile device to also be my main and only computer. When I place it near a monitor, I want it to spark into 'computer' mode. When I pull out a keyboard from my bag and place it near the phone - it should work. Same with the mouse. And it should function and operate with comparable performance to a regular laptop. I don't think this is too much to ask for. After all, I'm not asking for a battery that lasts all day am I?

krick 12y ago

I'm sure it's not just you, and people approve, but I do not. In fact, all I want is actual GNU/Linux on the mobile device, which boils down to native DM, which is usable with touchscreen and having nice API + drivers. Everything else will come. Something like that Nokia N900 with updated hardware would do just fine. (Well, almost). I don't need it to be "one environment for all devices" — in fact, I think it's pretty horrible idea, because what I need with keyboard and a couple of 24" monitors is far from what I need on 4.3" touchscreen (and neither is "Unity", btw). I just want my familiar OS with standard messaging services and daemons, that I can make do what I want by writing plain shellscript, and not some Java-framework with half-proprietary firmware on most devices, developed by some evil corporation, which makes money by advertising and spying on its users. So, well, what I need is not complicated (pretty much the opposite), but it requires "doing things right" and this is always incredibly hard. Essentially, to make proper DM it would require to hire someone, who already has written a couple of DMs which were used widely enough for mistakes made while inventing its API to become obvious. Unlikely that somebody, who isn't spying on his users would want to invest in something that big. And, furthermore, obviously there is much more people, who need Angry Birds, than people, who need transparent process interoperation.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Why do I have to have different computers for all of this when all I want is different I/O modalities (and related computing expansion devices)? Why do we keep ignoring the fact that what we want is the ability to experience our virtual world in the input / output environment that suits us at this moment? Everything else is secondary. AFAICT, because hardware makers determine the operating-system market rather than the other way around. I dreamed of a more modernized, Plan 9-like OS to ~~tie all devices together~~ RULE THEM ALL back in freshman year of college. It's simply the obvious thing to do if you're a user and enough of an OS geek to understand the idea. But, well, we softies don't drive those markets. We could never get the effort together to produce an operating system that would both support (via hardware drivers) and be supported by (in the sense of not having to crack open your phone with a screwdriver to install the thing) all the necessary hardware platforms.