UBports Community Update 22 | February 3, 2018

UniSuperBox

I love alliteration in numbers. Big 22, right here!

It's the UBports Community Update! These are hour-long (or so) livestreams where we get together and talk about what's been happening in UBports over the past fortnight. Episode 22 will be live on February 3, 2018 at 1900 UTC. You can catch it and a countdown on the YouTube live page.

We'd love to take your questions or talk about your news. Just post them in this thread and we'll do it live!

Here are some things we'll generally not cover, though:

Any question in our FAQ
The status of bug reports

We'll see you live!

domubpkm

Thanks for your good work.
Do you envisage a new update of web browsner ? It seems now, since the beginning of the year, that's impossible to read some html streaming sites with OTA-3, not all ; they ask to install adobe flash player, that's not possible i think, whereas with OTA-2, it was possible to read these some streaming sites without adobe flash player. Thanks again.

Locamama

Same problem with some site that asks us the adobe reader.

Même problème avec certain site qui nous demande le lecteur adobe.

hummlbach

Also the 'sendung mit der maus' switched their flash player... Now its not possible anymore to watch their latest episode with our browser. Thats really a major issue... for me at least...
So I think we had the topic browser in one of the former community updates, but I cant remember the conclusion anymore.

mihael

Guys, really a BIG thank you for all your work! I believe this is one of the most exciting projects in the tech world today!

I am crazy about my UBports phone because it is as close as possible to a linux computer. That means real multitasking. I have apps that are set up not to be suspended because I cannot stand to see a picture o the app replacing the live one and wait for the app to start. I want it to be available instantaneously.

And here comes my question. As @Flohack mentioned in a community update that his desire would be for the memory leaks to be fixed, what is causing the memory leaks, is this something to do with Vivid (and thus maintained - well, not anymore - by canonical) and will this be improved (or totally fixed) in Xenial?

I keep a close eye on my memory usage (top running in terminal) and I see the memory getting filled (not the cache mem). I also created a swap file of 2GB and that gets filled up to about 1GB and then at some random point the device restarts unity (not the whole phone as top in terminal still counts the days from the last start of the device). And I have 3GB of RAM (Pro 5).

Again, thank you. Sorry for such a long question, I hope you can get the essential out of it

flohack

@mihael well mostly the apps getting replaced by a picture are kicked out of memory, this is due to low memory, not because they are in the background. You can run 2-3 apps perfectly in the background, and they will respond immediately. So the problem, as far as we can see is that unity8 has not been optimized for a small memory footprint. This will not change now with xenial, since no one ever tried to optimize it, and UBports has no resources currently to do that. That are probably a few million lines of code behind. And uniy8 also runs very slow on a desktop and eats up all your memory, so this seems to be by design

mihael

Oh, thank you @Flohack for your input! So it is Unity and not certain apps that eat the memory? I am interested in having the webbrowser on all the time. It has a few tabs open and it has - as I understand - its own method of "killing" tabs to free memory. It's nice also to have the phone app on. And the Gallery So what would be a good combination between the size of the swap partition and using or not "prevent app suspension" in UT Tweak Tool? In other words how can we do the best with our current setup? For sure the ease of switching from app to app will make the phone smoother improving the overall experience of using our devices... And I think this is connected with why linux is better...

libremax

Question: is it possible to get back stats.ubports.com in a short term with simply a change in description ?

(I know the stats "Total Devices" was "wildly inaccurate" but at least it was possible to extrapolate some trends and stats by countries and devices, if not truly accurate, were useful.)

TartanSpartan

Ok my questions in decreasing order of priority I'd like to see addressed in the livestream:

How close are you to pushing Anbox builds for non-Mediatek devices on Xenial devel e.g. the MX4 or any of the three core devices? I think a large portion of the userbase wants to try it out and help you beta test but what's the timescale?
Is there any way we can get a changelog for the Xenial devel images? I'd like to know what's being improved from build to build.
Related to other user's' questions, when you update the web browser can you provide the ability to specify a download folder? It would be very convenient to have it go to the SD card automatically especially for devices with cramped internal storage.