The Road(Map)Explained (copied from OS)

[Lakotaubp]

This post is a copy of Marius' original post from here https://forums.ubports.com/topic/4965/the-road-map-explained We thought it might also be of use here.

I get this question a lot, why focus on making Lomiri compatible with upstream components and why are you helping getting Lomiri into different distros? Why not focus on Ubuntu Touch?
Why focus on making UbuntuTouch better? Why not make device X better right now!

And for many this choice of development direction might sound weird, and I get that, it's hard to know this if you’re not a developer working on these components. So i’ll try to explain why this is the best way for us to keep going.

The fact is that, focus on making Lomiri compatible with upstream components and making it possible for Lomiri to enter more distros will make Ubuntu Touch better, and much much better in the long run. This is a long term plan to make the Lomiri stack much better.

Doing upstream work greatly improves the support to all the components we heavenly depend on, so for us to upgrade our stack (like Bluez, NetworkManager, ofono and MANY others) we really need to make our source both buildable, usable and comparable with upstream non ubuntu patched components, as we cant maintain components like canonical did, so we really need to depend on upstream fixes. and to be honest this is better then what canonical did, as you can see what state we are in due to that. A great example is bluez, we are way behind upstream here, this is mostly due to the xenial base that again is due to our stack depending on xenial specific patches that makes it impossible to just upgrade base or even bluez without doing heavy porting.

Yes there will be a period where fixes for devices won't be prioritized, but for us to fix those now and later need to fix them all over again because we just made our own little fork is a sure death for us. We need to make a sustainable road head of us and not keep working on our little buble. This has been an issue with ubuntu touch from the beginning, it was only canonical doing the work with no outside contributors, this is something we really want to avoid. We need to make Lomiri a Linux desktop environment not only a Ubuntu Touch one.

Yes devices will be prioritized, but we need to follow upstream and get up to speed with all the great fixes we simply can't use.

Once this work is done, we don't need to worry about it anymore, as keeping up with upstream will be so much easier. Most of the work is to replace the ubuntu only patches that really do not solve anything other than making it much harder for us to upgrade our base to for example 20.04 or even pull in never fixes that will fix many of our issues.

But most important of all, when we are fully compatible, we will get more distro supported, this in turn will have many more developers looking and trying out Lomiri. This will greatly improve the system as we will get more contributions! An example for this is Luca from pmOS, he has done amazing work that we all enjoy today. And we need more developers like Luca to make Lomiri more awesome! We need to get out of our little Ubuntu Touch bubble and work with the huge Linux community, this will make Ubuntu Touch SHINE