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I love your post, man. Some good ideas right there. We all could use some encouragement right now...
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@UniSuperBox
Thanks for answering!
Too bad I don't use Telegram and probably will not register now (maybe if I needed to because of more discussions on Ubuntu Phone I would). But I'm open for conversation here. I can join IRC from time to time, but too bad that I cannot read the chat history 
Someone has already forked the Unity 8 here: https://unity8.org/ But I'm not sure if it is the right approach to have every single project in its own independent team. It may lead to chaos. In my opinion Ubports devs should take on organising the project and as quick as possible take these actions:
- Make a big, public anouncement that the team is forming to continue the project. Publish it everywhere possible so that everyone could see that there is the team, that the team is big and strong and is willing to help everyone jump in.
- Choose a name and set up the web pages, chats, mailing lists and overall platform, where the community can discuss. A kind of hub which would consolidate all the project from Unity 8 through snap phone images to Ubuntu SDK and applications.
- Contact as many Canonical developers and designers directly. Request them to share all the information, plans, designs and everything else what could speed up resuming development. Find out who of them would like to help. Have a chat with Ubuntu Core team to find out their attitude and how Ubuntu Core can power the phones.
- Create development infrastructure if possible.
- Make a long statement on where we are, what we want to achieve and what is the plan.
And what I would suggest for the start of the development:
- Focus only on existing Ubuntu devices end maybe those for which a port already exists is stable. I know that the more phones the better, but main focus should now shift to the core.
- Set up a small team to find and fix the most irritating errors (crashes, network, battery) and release one or two bugfix OTA-s, so that Click based system is more stable and reliable.
- Simultaneously start efforts towards creating Ubuntu Core images for both desktop and phone. Take (in the beginning) the 64-bit officially supported by Ubuntu devices: bq M10 tablet, Meizu Pro 5 phone and 64-bit desktop. Try to snap kernel, drivers and whatever else is needed to create the first running images.
- Move the Unity8 from Mir to Wayland. Allow the KDE Plasma Active team to jump here to help and create their snap as an alternative to Unity desktop.
- We are there - focus on stabilizing those, Unity 8 development for convergence, maybe start integrating Ubuntu phones with Ubuntu desktop (even if they are on seperate devices), fasten the app development, create a proper app store.
- After the first official, stable snap image is relased, push further on porting to new devices and finding way to cooperate with hardware manufacturers.
After showing off first snap sucesses the croudfunding campaign or even setting up a foundation might be a good option.
And do not get angry with Canonical too easy, but cooperate closely with them, contribute to snap. Their business decision was to give up the convergence, but its development would be definitely be a profit for them (more snaps, etc.).
That's my view, I am waiting to here your voice as well.
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@Mitu said in A vision of where to go after Ubuntu Touch's death:
Someone has already forked the Unity 8 here: https://unity8.org/
The 'someone' is Marius Gripsgård...
Move the Unity8 from Mir to Wayland
Main question to me: really to get rid of Mir (very difficult) OR make MIR Wayland-compatible (still not easy)? See also: http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/07/the-end-of-a-dream/
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Thank you @Mitu for sharing your vision. I agree with all you have said, and I'm really proud how rapidly the community gave a response to these breaking news.
If we want to keep Ubuntu Touch alive, we have to find soon an alternative to Ubuntu One services, including notifications and the app store. Then, that should be considered on a first step, because that would be the first thing to notice on Canonical's fading. Next step should be focus on Unity 8's evolution and snaps (and so on), because that only affects future plans and not so much on the current experience.
I want to thank you all guys, let's demonstrate how a community-driven mobile OS rocks!
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As for software center, I think that we may use Canonical's snap store. Many snaps for all form factors are landing there. But it would be nice to create an app that could support multiple snap stores. Whether we need our own store is not so obvious dor me.
But yes, ubuntu push is to be moved somewhere else.
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I agree with that. I know snaps would make things easier, but unluckly it's too soon to leave click apps. Users still depend on them.
Let's see where (and when) Canonical is going to left us at our own way...
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Clicks will not be easy to be left. Canonical began to do that, but hasn't finished. It is a long way to move phones to Ubuntu Core, but is should be in my opinion continued.
In the meantime click-based Ubuntu Phone should be updated once or twice. But only to fix bugs - the most energe should be put to the snap transition.
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Most of you have probably seen it, but here's the link to yesterdays UBports community Q&A:
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@Mitu said in A vision of where to go after Ubuntu Touch's death:
And what I would suggest for the start of the development
You've made a very nice summary of ideas here, but for the start of development it may be important to distinguish much more clearly between what's genuinely needed versus what might be helpful at some point in the future.
Probably the most valuable thing that can be done as a starting step is just to look at what are the minimum set of changes needed to complete Unity 8 on its own terms (and "complete" in this sense probably means finalizing a viable desktop). No major re-architecting or trying to replace important bits of the stack -- just try to follow through on the final touches of the project as it exists, the kind of stuff that Canonical's team would have been doing if the project had carried through.
The reason to do that is because, by trying first to understand and complete the project on its own terms (i.e. the convergent OS where the same codebase can serve mobile, tablet and desktop), everyone involved will learn a good deal about the actual issues of the project, and about why its developers made the choices they did.
From that vantage point, everyone will be much better placed to make informed decisions about what really needs to change in the long run -- whether it's what to do with Mir (it may not need to be replaced at all given Canonical's ongoing plans for it in IoT projects), whether a new app store is necessary (it may be possible to continue to use the existing snap store just fine), or any of the other considerations that might come up.
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@UniSuperBox can u share how i can join chat on telegram for ubuntu touch
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@Hsabun You might have to use the browser or webapp to join, the UT telegram client does not support supergroups (a telegram feature for groups with more than 200 people) and invite links yet. That's why we are currently maintaining two groups, the UBports Fan Club (supergroup) and the old UBports group, so that people on Ubuntu Touch can still chat. We're looking into fixing supergroups on Ubuntu Touch at the moment, but I can't make any promises...
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Keeping it alive. Ubuntu touch could help a lot of open source graphic illustrators like the development of paint apps that uses stylus.
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3.Contact as many Canonical developers and designers directly. Request them to share all the information, plans, designs and everything else what could speed up resuming development. Find out who of them would like to help. Have a chat with Ubuntu Core team to find out their attitude and how Ubuntu Core can power the phones.
Seems to be a very good advice. the abrupt end of the project may drive some individuals toward a personal commitment and support for the project .
has anyone tried something in this direction? -
@MrHoliday This is not very easy, because Canonical laid off more than 100 employees, that's most of the phone and Unity 8 team, so the responsible people are not very easy to reach and getting an official answer from canonical proves to be very challenging. However, we are in touch with some (former) Canonical developers and designers and some even joined our team (unpaid and in their free time of course, what we are really grateful for).
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@NeoTheThird I agree on that one, it would have been much nicer of them to involve us since they knew about our project quite well. They could have get us some last minute contacts to organize the takeover. But we are more or less alone, and our network to former employees is not that huge.
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@Flohack said in A vision of where to go after Ubuntu Touch's death:
They could have get us some last minute contacts to organize the takeover. But we are more or less alone, and our network to former employees is not that huge.
Bear in mind that it might not be legal for them to pass on (former or current) employees' contact details to you without those people's explicit permission. And since those people are probably quite busy sending out CVs and suchlike at the moment, they may not be very responsive in the short term even if they want to get involved with Yunit/UBPorts.
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@WebDrake I know, this is a big part of the problem... Let´s see how we can continue with what we have.
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@Flohack I would give it time. I don't know about other people, but personally I'm not placing any expectations on UBPorts or Yunit for quick results -- I'd much rather everyone just took some time to patiently explore the codebases that exist, than have anyone feel pressured to get things done straight away.
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@WebDrake That's a very reasonable approach and it's also what we think. Still, for some problems we need answers asap, because we don't want to allow for a gap between the end of canonicals support and our takeover... We'll see how it goes.
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An update: Let's converge!
A few things have happend since I started this thread. I have some recent thoughts that I would like to add to discussion - especially regarding convergence:
Ubuntu UI toolkit
Where we are?
The current situation is not too happy I believe: there is an SDK abandoned by Canonical using ony the custom controls (created before QtQuick Controlls have landed). Those custom components have no adoption outside of Ubuntu Touch ecosystem and they are probably not portable.
Another problem is that other Qt apps, GTK+ apps etc. do not integrate graphically with Ubuntu Touch, which is a pitfall as well if we wanted to deliver the seamless convergence. A sweet spot would be if you couldn't tell the toolkit without at a first glance when looking at a siple app (I don't mean the situation where toolkit specific widgets are used etc. of course).
The legacy
So, what we are left with?
- The toolkit. Working code and many apps based on it.
- The beginning of the new (2.0) toolkit planned to be transited to Qt Quick Controls.
- Suru design language. A beautiful and well thought-out approach to applications UI. Designed for convergence.
- Ubuntu design page - there are the gui guidelines and tons of mockups - including those not implemented yet but showing the direction Canonical had with the toolkit.
- Canonical design blog - there are some app mockups that can be invaluable for continuing both SDK and Core Apps.
Honestly? It's a lot!
Let's use it then!
I wasn't aware of the UITK2.0's existance until a couple of minutes ago. So there goes the plan suggestion:
- In general I believe the UITK vision and concepts are unique and cool and apps like core music app, Dekko and uNav proved it. I am totally for keeping it.
- Canonical realized that Qt Quick Controls are the base to move onto and that is the best plan I think. The UITK2 repo has appeared on GitHub - it should be evaluated and forked. Most probably in cooperation with YUnit and under their GitHub team (if they will want to do this).
- The mockups should be moved somewhere in case Ubuntu Design webpage disappears someday.
- The goal should be to have the two things: one is a portable Ubuntu (or Suru) style for QQC (who knows, maybe it could even pushed upstream to Qt?) which could be used to style anything - including existing QQC applications written without UITK in mind and a portable library providing a set of additional components - AdaptivePageLayout, Ubuntu's list items, bottom edge, headers etc. There should be no duplication though - Ubuntu buttons, label, checkboxes, radio buttons etc. should be dropped in favor of Suru styled QQC.
Clicks and snaps
On this topic I'm still in favor on snaps and even moving to Ubuntu Core (to be precise I mean wrapping Halium-based images into core, os and gadget snaps to make the Ubuntu Core images out of them). I know, there are many different thoughts on this topic, it's just my opinion (as the whole of this post, frankly). Let's list the reasons I see now:
- Snaps are actively developed by Canonical, further development of Clicks would be yet another task for Ubports' devs.
- Snaps have interfaces. It can be worth to investigate them, as they can allow to build the awesome permission system - where the apps could hypothetically declare their own permissions (such as Dekko declaring permission to read mails that are stored somewhere inside its snap settings - you could decide in system settings what apps can read from dekko).
- Maybe it could be possible to replace content hub with a set of snap interfaces. Maybe it could be possible to avoid copying files around and multiplicating them every time you pass it from app to app. In my opinion apps should be able to read (for example for viewing) files from other apps without copying them to their own directories.
- Convergence. If we want convergence, there will be the need for incorporation probably both snapd and flatpak in the images (and not to use things such as Libertine to install desktop apps at some point of time).
I think that's all for now. I'll keep posting any further ideas for discussion here.
