Ubuntu Touch Q&A 58 Is This Saturday 7th Of September At 19:00 UTC

UBportsNews

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 58 is this Saturday the 7th of September at 19:00 UTC. Please join us for Ubuntu Touch development, updates and answers to your questions! Post them here before the event and Youtube Livechat and Telegram during the live show.

Live Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TigBOTfcFGc

Please remember that questions on porting to device **** or it's status, and questions on bugs will not be answered

GizmoChicken

I get that "Libertine allows you to use standard desktop applications in Ubuntu Touch." But would you please explain (preferably ELI5) :

Why Libertine is needed, and
How Libertine does what it does.

Also, once UT fully supports Wayland (using new Mir and new Unity8), will UT need Libertine for running desktop Wayland applications?

Krille

As far as I understand, webGL is available in QtWebEngine in Qt 5.13. Would it be possible to upgrade to Qt 5.13 in Ubuntu Touch?

Aury88

I would like to know how and what are the steps you follow to (still partially) port UT on Pinephone and Pinetab.
How do you accomplished that? what are the skills required? do you used some documentation as reference?
I know that this is not your priority now, but I really would like to try port UT on some open fruity ARM board (;-)) and some documentation on that procedure would be very helpful (or at least interesting)

geekvine

Could you guys talk a little about future plans for updating Open Store if there are any? I understand the lack of resources and the focus on the OS itself, but maybe an OTA focusing solely on the store would be helpful as more people come into the OS. it would great to see more filtering options, sorting of native/webapps, etc. Just a thought, keep up the great work, the OS has come a loooooooong way over the past year!

doniks

tl;dr
Could xmir be reverted to not open a new window for every menu?

long version:

We have libertine to run desktop application on UT. I remember it being quite ok for some cases. Not perfect, but sufficient for certain use cases (e.g. gedit). In the current version (I think I'm on devel), it has changed such that every menu opens as it's own window. To me that basically renders libertine/xmir unusable.

I assume that this change came with an upgrade to a newer version that was still being made by Canonical?! And I think it was meant as a stepping stone towards greater things where Mir and Xmir are just awesome. However, as it stands now I would consider it a regression.

Now, I'm thinking how to get out of this regressed state and the preferred answer would of course be, lets move forward to the envisioned solution. But, hasn't the vision changed? Xmir development stopped. Mir is turning into a wayland compositor. Architecturally, I think that's a good thing, but that might be quite a journey still until gedit runs well on top of xwayland on top of mir the wayland compositor.

Is it conceivable as a short term solution to somehow revert/reconfigure xmir to not render menus as windows? I'm willing to get my hands dirty if I would know the direction. Any pointers?

dobey

@doniks said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 58 Is This Saturday 7th Of September At 19:00 UTC:

Could xmir be reverted to not open a new window for every menu?

I've just made a PR to include the workaround as default behavior for now: https://github.com/ubports/libertine/pull/60

arubislander

I know that question in the state of ports to specific devices will not be answered, but @mariogrip posted some very tantalizing tweets showcasing UT running on the Librem 5, the PinePhone and the PineTab. So I was wondering if an exception could be made for these devices and we could be given and idea on what was done, how it was done, what still needs to be done, and how the community could get involved, if at all, to help get us there.

TotalSonic

@dobey said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 58 Is This Saturday 7th Of September At 19:00 UTC:

@doniks said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 58 Is This Saturday 7th Of September At 19:00 UTC:

Could xmir be reverted to not open a new window for every menu?

I've just made a PR to include the workaround as default behavior for now: https://github.com/ubports/libertine/pull/60

Rodney - is there a terminal command I can use to install this so I can test it out? I am on RC channel.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Lakotaubp

@arubislander I think the answers can be found in this link https://www.pine64.org/2019/09/05/september-update-the-pinephone-is-real-shipping-soon/ and the links in it for now. When the "Brave Heart" batch of PinePhones are ready in October for wider testing no doubt that will change, even then they are not planned to ship with an OS.

dobey

@TotalSonic It's merged now and will be in devel image tomorrow. If you've already implemented the workaround to add -flatten option to libertine-xmir script, then you're already using it.

TotalSonic

@dobey - ok, guess I will wait until it makes its way to RC then - I use my UT device as a daily driver so I don't want to change to devel right now.

Thanks for making this quick fix!

Best regards,
Steve Berson