As soon as Ubuntu Phone becomes stable enough for daily use, I will switch from Android to it.
Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory, Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.
(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.)
Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop?
Honestly? No. I can't imagine the agony of trying to type out a SQL query on my phone. I have a Macbook Air, which is light enough for me to carry around with me the vast majority of the time- it's great.
If I wanted something smaller I would perhaps get a tablet with a keyboard (or a netbook, if they weren't all terrible)... but doing any meaningful work on my phone? No thanks. I can barely bring myself to type out a reasonably-sized e-mail on mine.
Honestly, I prefer my Droid 4 keyboard to the vast majority of laptop keyboards. I can't begin to describe how convenient it is to have an SSH client with a genuinely good keyboard right in my pocket at all times.
Yeah, the MBP keyboard is not really a fair comparison, but I definitely think the little D4 keyboard is far superior to most PC laptop keyboards, especially the compact ones.
I use my phone right now for sshing into my home machines and getting analytics, benchmarks, error logs, making spot changes to files, editing users and groups, etc. If you have a smartphone with a foldout keyboard, you're set. The possibility of me being able to do this with urxvt and emacs running on the phone is just awesome. Interacting with postgres on the cli with my phone is a dream as well. Obviously writing out huge statements is a pain, but you're generally just running one liners through to find some info.
I guess I can't see the need to do any of those things on a bus, or on the street. It's extremely rare that I would have to do something that couldn't wait for an hour or two until I'm either at work or home.
I have one of those keyboards and it's huge -- bigger than my Nexus 7. I've played around with a bluetooth mouse and that keyboard on my Nexus 7 but it still doesn't seem that great for doing real work.
I think you are right, but just in the current context.. but the way this little mobiles beauties are just getting the same power as our pcs or notebooks.. its just use as a phone when on street, and in home or office.. just plug a keyboard, and a bigger screen.. and there it is.. a computer.. and now for the hardcore stuff :)
> Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.
I used to perform most of these tasks on Nokia phone (yes, right!) - N900. Too bad, it didn't pick up on the market.
>Won't many of the projects in the Ubuntu repositories be unavailable because of architectural reasons, i.e. ARM phones versus x86/64 desktops?
Almost the entirety of Linux userland software is very portable because the server space needs it to run on x86/sparc/power/itanic/whatever. There are exceptions but they tend to be rare and temporary, because hardware vendors don't want customers switching to x86 just because foo app doesn't run on their architecture, and for open source apps the hardware vendors can fix it themselves.
Meanwhile Linux is about the only sensible thing you can currently install on the vast expanse of old PowerPC Macs that can't run current versions of MacOS but can run current versions of Ubuntu or Debian, so any that get recycled into a personal server or a DVR box or whatever will have users pointing out any problems and requesting they be fixed.
And for the most part portability is portability: If you find x86 assembly somewhere and replace it with portable C and an ifdef to use the asm only on x86, or fix an endian issue, you haven't just fixed it for PowerPC or SPARC, you've fixed it for everyone.
This, incidentally, is why having a single architecture is so unhealthy: It promotes everyone forgetting about portability entirely, which prevents new, better architectures from taking hold merely because it's so much more work to port the existing installed base of software.
I run Raspbian, another Debian-based distro, on my Raspberry Pi (ARMv6 CPU) and haven't run into any missing packages yet. Can't imagine there are many projects out there these days that are still architecture-specific, outside of compilers and JITs and so forth, many of which (e.g. LuaJIT, V8, LLVM) already support ARM.
As an example, Yesod doesn't work on the raspberry pi, because GHCi is not in the debian ARM repositories. This is annoying, because compiling everything yourself takes forever on the raspberry.
It should be noted there is a difference between "not in repos, so I have to manually build, but it works" and "there is absolutely no way to run this software on this platform due to the processor".
It is really promising for the current software written against glibc and friends to have all these arm devices running homebrew ARM builds without many hitches.
Especially compared to a platform like, say, Windows, where even though there is an ARM version (Windows RT) which is extremely stripped down and awful on all fronts, there is no software for it because of API compatibility issues and the fact that without open source recompiling most of the Windows software catalog is impossible.
Ah, interesting, had actually looked into GHC and knew there was no GHCi support for ARM (also, ARM is only a Tier 2 platform), but did not realize that made it impractical to use Yesod. That kinda sucks.
Much of the software in Ubuntu is available on ARM today. If you have an Ubuntu ARM device (say, you are running the desktop on a Panda board), you can launch Ubuntu Software Centre and see for yourself.
For a less pretty view (and one that will only make much sense if you already understand how the Ubuntu archives are organized (poorly)), check out http://ports.ubuntu.com/
This sounds somewhat too optimistic? Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd think the majority of people using their laptop for the tasks you talk about would prefer a real keyboard and some usable screen estate over a small screen and slow typing anyday. Might get the job done, but fun is otherwise and it's definitely not the right tool for the desktop job.
I'm pretty sure the parent is being sarcastic. It's wonderfully subtle, though: most people always overdo sarcasm out of fear that it'll go over the heads of most people, which just reduces it to crass snark. This perfectly dances the line.
well thats the beauty, you can just plug keyboard/mouse via usb and hdmi for screen into your phone, ehm desktop-PC - see raspberry pis, cubieboard and so on.
If you're going to use all those adapters & accessories... you may as well just use a desktop or laptop. Which probably already has all those packages you frequently use, and runs them faster.
Who likes traveling with a laptop? As much as a soft-keyboard and connectbot suck, I already commonly use them as a replacement for carrying around a laptop. The convenience of needing a pocket instead of a bag is worth it.
(Also, who cares about speed? It's not like you are going to be rendering or building on it, so even the most modest of smartphones today will be more than enough. We no longer need the latest and greatest to be productive.)
You know where a market for disruption exists? The millions of iOS devices that are now being relegated to the trash bin of tech. Very soon everything from iPhone 3GS and back will be obsolete. You will not be able to update apps or OS. I have a nice pile of iPod Touch units that I can't develop for and will not move past their last update (was it iOS 4.2-something?).
You don't have to build any hardware. It's already there. And it's nice too.
Provide a path for a Linux (or whatever) phone to be loaded into these devices and you instantly create a market for probably hundreds of millions of devices that will either end-up in the trash bin or forever forgotten in a desk drawer.
If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of charge. Instant access to millions upon millions of customers who will be facing a very real choice of having to spend hundreds of dollars to get a new iOS device or, instead, try W8 Phone for iDevices for free. Yes, apps will be important. For some, this will not work. For others it would be a no-brainer.
The same would be true of Google/Android.
If I could load something else onto my half-dozen now-obsolete iPod's I'd do it. Yes, I know you can Whited00r up to a somewhat crippled iOS5, but that's not really a solution, certainly not for a hundred million devices.
If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of charge.
Never, ever, ever going to happen. Apple would provide the access required to do that, so you'd need to reverse engineer the device in order to install a custom OS on it- something that Apple would likely take legal action against.
Add to that the perception that WP is a dead-end OS for crappy old devices, and you're ruined your brand too.
Android you can, with bulk surplus Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus phones because the binaries for the proprietary hardware have been released, albeit with very restrictive conditions on what you can do with those binaries, so distribution is out of the question unless you're selling for bitcoins.
iOS nothing has been released so you have to reverse engineer everything.
There is a project that tries to run Android on old iphones (iphone2G and iphone3G). I don't know just how functional it is but even if it was there's no way you could ran the latest version of android on that kind of (old) hardware).
And Microsoft would never, ever ever do something like that. I'm pretty sure they would face legal troubles if they did.
Having a Terminal application will make the Phone more appealing to coders and old school Linux users. I fail to see how this will make the Ubuntu Phone more appealing to the average user.
EDIT:
Apparently saying something that goes against the current on HN will start a shit storm (downvotes, obviously).
Wait, so including features that don't immediately appeal to the average user necessarily means there will be nothing that appeals to the average user?
I think it's pretty clear the OP's point was only in reference to the Terminal app, not Ubuntu in general. It's a valid point and doesn't really deserve the snark in your last sentence.
I think it's pretty clear that the OPs point was that there was a terminal app on the phone and therefore it was a geek phone that's never going to take off, and that my snark was absolutely appropriate.
In fact he specifically said "I fail to see how this will make the Ubuntu Phone more appealing to the average user." shortly followed by "my point was that this will remain a niche phone."
-Edit to remove somewhat unnecessary snark-
I don't think 'your logic is broken there somewhere' is all that snarky in the grand scheme of things, in fact it's a pretty clear statement of fact. The two things "terminal apps are not appealing to average users" and "this phone will remain niche" are absolutely not logically connected.
I would argue that a good terminal app can help make something easier to use for both technical and average users alike.
Since you can assume that the terminal will be never or very rarely used by average users you can make the advanced functionality available as command line applications and leave the most basic/common options in the GUI.
A naive user is far more likely to check a box and click apply by accident than they are to type "rm -rf /".
A good example is a modern version of Windows, the control panel is full of options,tabs,checkboxes etc that can do weird stuff to your system and consequently make it harder to use because (until recently with powershell) windows has never had a useful commandline.
I upvoted you, because I think you raise a valid question.
IMO, to build a successful smartphone that is appealing to the average user, that smartphone will require a base of desirable applications.
I see basically two routes to attempt to achieve this:
1) Build a phone that is so desirable to average users that app developers will find it profitable to develop for it (eg, iPhone).
2) Build a phone that is so desirable to developers that many will pick it up regardless of the profitability of the market. Then hope that these apps are of sufficient quality/desirability that they become part of making the phone desirable to average users.
#1 is incredibly difficult to achieve right now due to the maturity of the market, with two major players. Even Microsoft is having a tremendous amount of difficulty with this route. For Canonical, I believe it would be effectively impossible.
With #2, getting to step 1 (modest developer adoption) is easy. Where it often breaks down, is in getting the developers to build apps that aren't just appealing to them (eg, more terminal apps, more ssh apps, more special purpose tools that appeal to geeks, etc). But modest developer adoption is better than no adoption at all, perhaps?
I honestly don't see Canonical having much success with this at all, but I don't think avoiding apps that are appealing to coders will help in their case.
>Having a Terminal application will make the Phone more appealing to coders and old school Linux users. I fail to see how this will make the Ubuntu Phone more appealing to the average user.
Step 1: Get coders to use your device.
Step 2: Coders want their own apps to run on their own device, so they port them.
Result: Now your device has lots of apps and you've removed one of the most significant barriers to normal people using it.
But a general purpose device like a phone should be able to cater to different audiences. There is no problem to include applications that will be used by only a subset of the audience. Plus, installing and removing applications is easy, I suppose.
Not really. We already have several different platforms out there catering to "average Joe". I think it's time hackers actually get something tailored to their use instead of having to suffer compromises on other platforms.
I agree with you. I want Ubuntu and Linux to succeed in having at least a significant part of the market, but I don't think it's possible, or not as fast as I would hope, if they keep prioritizing stuff for developers and stuff, when Linux is still considered confusing and hard to use by many "normal" people.
So they should really prioritize that part. Leave the developer/geeky stuff for later.
If these really just acted like little linux boxes wouldn't that be a huge plus for corporate support? Being able to SSH into these phones to install VPN or other default applications instead of forcing the users/ui to see them? What about being able to 'flash' a corporate phone to a default install or manage permissions?
u fail to see this isn't an announcement from ubuntu on declaring their strategy on getting average users and so fail to see that on HN, mostly hackers usually like to hack their device.
I've been thinking for a while, actually, that terminal emulation isn't something I want today.
It might still be appropriate to have some terminal/shell distinction, but emulating an old text-only terminal imposes UI issues. For instance, my shell sometimes prints "you have new mail" to tell me about it. But my computer already has a notification system built-in - I don't need random text strings in my work area. I think the ideas in this mockup are at least moving in the right direction, which is using all of the capabilities of the computer.
It's not clear to me that everything appearing in the terminal is a shell response. It may be a more sophisticated interface than, say, UXTerm, with some mid-level processing for command completion perhaps. At least we can hope....
I see. I would vote the other way- keep the shell intact, and install a new UI. UIs can be swapped out, but breaking the shell may lead to unforeseen undesirable consequences.
I fear this is going to be very much a niche phone but I just might get one to support the project.
Between Android, iOs, the remnants of blackberry and the Microsoft offering there will not be a whole lot of room for a new entrant that is not compatible with any of the above. A hackable phone that is not tied to one of the three largest 500 lbs+ gorillas sounds like a really neat thing to have.
Here's to hoping battery life will be acceptable and that they won't spoil it by tying it to Ubuntu services all over the place. Ideal would be NBR + phone capability, possibility to hook up an external display and hold the marketing.
>Between Android, iOs, the remnants of blackberry and the Microsoft offering there will not be a whole lot of room for a new entrant that is not compatible with any of the above
It seems exceedingly likely that if more than a few dozen people use this, someone (if not Canonical itself) will produce an Android compatibility layer.
What I wish Canonical would do is to do it right. The naive implementation is to take the existing Android source and hack it into Ubuntu like WINE, which is almost certainly a lot easier when the source is already available. What Canonical ought to do is superset Android natively: Make all of the APIs available the same as they are on Android, so that you can take the source to an Android app and just run it on Ubuntu, but you can also start from there and make relatively few changes in order to comply with any differences in Ubuntu's usability standards and have your existing Android app running properly and natively on Ubuntu in very short order.
That would give Ubuntu all of the Android apps right away, and then give Android developers an easy way to fix any compatibility-related issues with running those apps on Ubuntu without making significant changes to their existing code.
Meanwhile now you have Android running next to POSIX and developers have the temptation to use all the traditional gnu stuff plus whatever Ubuntu adds to make it appropriate to the form factor, which has the developers pushing Google to put that stuff in Android.
There is a foreseeable future in which Android and Ubuntu end up as different distributions of the same basic OS the same as RedHat and Ubuntu today.
Then Canonical has a second-rate Android platform, on which most people run apps that don't work so well, and they have zero control over the platform, so the vendors they are competing with can directly run them off the road.
If what you want is to run Android apps, stick with an Android phone.
>Then Canonical has a second-rate Android platform, on which most people run apps that don't work so well, and they have zero control over the platform, so the vendors they are competing with can directly run them off the road.
Where do you get zero control? Android is licensed under GPL and Apache. The only way Google "controls" it at all is by funding its development. If Google goes in a direction Canonical doesn't like they can fork it at any time with the only cost that they have to fund all future development themselves, which is apparently what you want them to do from the start.
>If what you want is to run Android apps, stick with an Android phone.
What if I want to run Android apps and gnu apps at the same time?
If I'm understanding you correctly, you wouldn't need to SSH in to your phone from another device. You could run something like SQLite locally and access it from the terminal, or write Ubuntu applications that expect services to be available on certain ports.
Would rather have a bsd phone. Hell even a netbsd phone than a linux phone but I will accept your Ubuntu phone over Android anyday though I fully expect Ubuntu to get sued out of existence once they start getting into the mobile biz. There isn't a day that goes by when Samsung isn't being sued by a hundred different corporations or Samsung isn't themselves suing a hundred different corporations.
I'm also secretly hoping Ubuntu is paying attention to security with all the mobile spying going on and not just concentrating on making the latest supercoleslawesome twitter integration while they develop this.
I think it's sad that the core apps include Facebook and Twitter, but not a real instant messaging client (as in "I can install my own server if necessary", "end to end encryption", etc.) Instead of more client implementations for the same commercial services, the free software world should work on bringing the state of the art to free (as in freedom) tools.
No, this is not Richard Stallman speaking. I just want to keep my data on my own server, or at least have the choice to host it at a company in my own country.
Facebook Chat is just their private server of an open protocol (XMPP). Unless the client specifically prevents you from doing so, you should be able to use your own server just like you can with e.g. Pidgin.
Well, I have some unfortunate news for you: to my knowledge, not one single Facebook Chat app allows this. There is no market. It is beyond wishful thinking to expect Ubuntu to turn this around.
Exactly, there is no market for real privacy and openness, and it certainly is not in Google's or Apple's interests.
That's why I count on free software to close the gap. Free as in: free of corporate interests, no need to make money, no need to provide access to intelligence agencies. I pay for the hardware, and I pay to transmit data. But the data stays mine.
Well, it depends on whether they're planning to build a Facebook Chat app, or a Chat app that supports Facebook (like the previously mentioned Pidgin). The document is just a use case map, not a proposal for any specific application.
Really I wouldn't want just a busybox terminal. I already have that on Android. It's ok, but has limited functionality. What I'd want would be the full range of typical GNU commands.
I just want to point out that the link is for user submitted design suggestions and is not necessarily official Canonical plan of record for what will ship.
No info. But hopefully the first one will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will be 64-bit (Cortex A57 and Cortex A53 class chips). It would be a mistake for them to start out with a 32 bit version, just to switch to the 64 but version months later or a year later.
One concern is that Ubuntu is probably shaping up to start rolling release and Wayland support in 14.10, and they face a current real issue of dealing with X in the embedded space. If the launch the phone with 14.04 (though, they don't have much of a choice if aiming for an H1 release) they end up ripping out the graphics stack half a year or a year later if they use X.
And there are still those awful rumors of Canonical writing their own windowing server and compositor. They spread themselves so thin sometimes that you rip the bread apart.
I doubt that they would be using such bleeding edge SoC if they want to aim at first half of 2014. Heck, best info I found was that the chips themselves are going to begin shipping in 2014. And building a phone around a brand new SoC will take longer than 6 months, even if they had a established OS (which they don't).
The apps built against it will be using qtwebkit, I imagine they will go with webkit. Maybe use a reskinned rekonq or some other qt based browser as a "default" browser.
What I'm more worried about than the choice of html engine, is if they are going to use chrome or firefox webapp manifests, because they are incompatible and one of them is necessary for first class web applications.
Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory, Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.
(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.)