Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC
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I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with Unity installed from universe ( https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-unity-desktop-on-ubuntu-18-04-bionic-beaver-linux ) . This will install version 7.5 .
This year, the new LTS 20.04 will be released and I hope I can continue using Unity. Is it realistic to have Unity 8 available for 20.04 in April or May?
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@UBportsNews
Is it just my perception, or is interest in UT increasing? -
Are you being prevented from opening your bank account, or is it the usual bureaucratic red tape, or both?
*** OR do you have good news about this ? *** -
@Mondane Unity 7 is still included in 20.04. However, there is no way Unity8 would be included in 20.04 main/universe archive at this point. Though, as the goal for UT is to move to 20.04 in the next year or so, it will at least get built for it. However, with so few developers, there isn't anyone really concentrating on fixing the issues with running Unity 8 daily on a PC, and phone/tablet is still a priority.
Anyone is welcome to contribute to unity8 and work on the issues that make it not be usable, though.
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I switched my Fairphone 2 to
develsince the merge of the new version of Unity8. It was pretty stable at that time, but I have the feeling that I have way more crashes and bugs in the last few weeks (current window not switching to selected app if already opened when tapping the drawer icon, SMS list displayed weirdly on the top, keyboard often not opening, many crashes...). Do you plan to freeze features integration soon and focus on stability to be able to push OTA-12 on RC, or do you want to integrate more new things first? If so, what things? Any idea when the merge window for new features will close and we can expect more stability again?Thank you for your amazing work, UT is an awesome project.
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Question for Q&A: Based on your experiences developing for the PinePhone, are pure Linux devices (such as the PinePhone) expected to suffer from fewer bugs compared to ported Android devices that rely on hybris/halium?
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I hear last time that.. Mir is going to be replaced with Wayland.... Does this mean that we can run desktop apps (kde / gnome) in UT in the future ?
And will it be possible to run UT in other distributions like postmarketos/fedora?
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Not a question, but I just want to say...
Congratulations on completing and marking closed the Unity8+Mir upgrade project!
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@erlend said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC:
I hear last time that.. Mir is going to be replaced with Wayland....
The devs can clear this up better than I can, and so I defer to the devs for a more complete explanation.
But in the meantime, suffice to say that it's not quite correct to say that "Mir is going to be replaced with Wayland." (Mir is a display server, and Wayland is a protocol.) Rather, UBports is replacing the "old" Mir display server with the "new" Mir display server.
The "old" MIr display server used its own (non-Wayland compliant) protocol, while the "new" Mir display server is now Wayland compliant. As of about Mir 1.6, in addition to being Wayland compliant, "new" also supports the legacy protocol that was used by the "old" Mir display server. However, that legacy support will eventually be removed from Mir (probably starting from about Mir 1.7), hence the need to "Waylandify" Ubuntu Touch.
Questions for Q&A: Regarding your efforts to "Waylandify" Ubuntu Touch, have you had a chance to experiment much with moving libertine to use xwayland? And if so, what are your initial impressions regarding the difficulty of the project?
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@GizmoChicken said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC:
As of about Mir 1.6, in addition to being Wayland compliant, "new" also supports the legacy protocol that was used by the "old" Mir display server. However, that legacy support will eventually be removed from Mir (probably starting from about Mir 1.7)
Thanks for the nice explanation. I'll add more detail from the Mir side:
- Ubuntu Touch release uses Mir 0.24
- Ubuntu Touch devel uses Mir 1.2
- Mir added Wayland support in Mir 0.28 (Aug 2017)
Since then it has been the stated intention to drop support for the mirclient API "once Wayland support was good enough". - mirclient is not supported for all the Mir "graphics platforms" (only "Mesa", "X11" and UBport's "android" - not "eglstream", "Wayland" or "dispmanx").
- Apart from UBports there are no downstream users of the mirclient API, but as of Mir's current release (1.6) it is still supported.
There are changes on Mir "master" that break and drop mirclient support but these have not been incorporated into a release yet. There are bug fixes and X11 enhancements that could benefit UBports and may be split out into another 1.x release.
@erlend said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC:
Mir is going to be replaced with Wayland....
As @GizmoChicken says, it is the mirclient API that will be replaced by the Wayland protocol. Mir is going nowhere. Mir is to Unity8 as Mutter is to GNOME, Kwin is to KDE or wlroots is to Sway. (Both Mir and wlroots are designed to support multiple user shells, Mutter and Kwin are more closely integrated.)
@erlend said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC:
Does this mean that we can run desktop apps (kde / gnome) in UT in the future ?
That is unchanged. It will remain possible to run desktop apps in UT. They may not run well because of the form factor (but that isn't related to using mirclient or Wayland).
@erlend said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67 Saturday 11th Of January At 19:00 UTC:
And will it be possible to run UT in other distributions like postmarketos/fedora?
Mir works for both of these and is in the Fedora archive. Unity8 needs work to run in a "desktop" environment (but that isn't related to using mirclient or Wayland). Other parts of UT do not make sense without phone hardware.
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@GizmoChicken No, I haven't tried libertine yet... I will... but I'm still waiting for my brave heart to arrive... So I have only tested UT on Raspberry pi 3... And there it is not really stable long enough to test it. I'm expecting the phone to be a fixer-upper too... so I'm trying to learn as much possible about the phone and the different projects.
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About Wayland is there an ETA about using native Wayland application ? Which issues need to be fixed ?
Thank you for your feedback.
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Is someone actually working on using halium 7.1 for the Fairphone 2? If no, is it planned?
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hi. thanks for your amazing work! my question: are there any plans which devices will be supported in the future, e.g. with 20.04 LTS later on? so which devices are "safe to buy" now? thanks!
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@gouchi when it's ready :). You can follow repositories if you want to see progress.
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Devel channel is coming along well with the new Unity 8 and Mir. Congrats!
These were part of Canonical's previous unfinished work from years ago.
There were also some work already done for the multi-display support which I'm very excited for!
Aside from these, are there any other Canonical unfinished works that will be worked on in the future to be integrated in UT? And if there's nothing more, what's the plan for the future developments in terms of design and big features?
We will be somewhat like "we're on our own now"
So far, not much "big" changes or new features so I'm curious about this.
This is not to discredit UBports and our work. I'm just curious who will now decide for big changes in UT
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@kugiigi Didn't you get the wrong Q and A? It's the one from January 11th here!
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@domubpkm LOL, I just saw this in the unread tab so I though this is the latest
I'll jsut repost there. Thanks
