Ubuntu Touch Q&A 51 Saturday 1st Of June At 19:00 UTC

[UBportsNews]

The 51st Ubuntu Touch Q&A is this Saturday the 1st of June at 19:00 UTC. Along with the latest Ubuntu Touch updates and developments we would also like your questions. Please post them below and we will do our very best to answer them live during the show.

Youtube live link for Saturday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYupiSMCHOA

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

[alefnode]

A couple of questions here.

How is the working about integrating Wayland?
Is going to continue with Click packaging system? How is the integration with Snap?

Thanks

[domubpkm]

Will the wonderful Ubports black logos made by Ruben Carneiro be included by default in the next OTA ?

[alan_g]

Seeing the above question about integrating Wayland I think it would be good time to explain how some things fit together:

1. "New Mir"
2. "New Unity8"
3. Replacing Xmir with Xwayland
4. Enabling apps using toolkits that support Wayland
5. Migrating existing apps to Wayland
6. Migrating compositior components to Wayland

[dobey]

@alefnode said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 51 Saturday 1st Of June At 19:00 UTC:

Is going to continue with Click packaging system? How is the integration with Snap?

There have been many discussions about this already, including a very recent thread here on the forum. Please read those. I don't think it's worthwhile to bring this up again in the Q&A as such.

[GizmoChicken]

@alan_g said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 51 Saturday 1st Of June At 19:00 UTC:

Seeing the above question about integrating Wayland I think it would be good time to explain how some things fit together:

1. "New Mir"
2. "New Unity8"
3. Replacing Xmir with Xwayland
4. Enabling apps using toolkits that support Wayland
5. Migrating existing apps to Wayland
6. Migrating compositior components to Wayland

Yes! Please discuss all of the above, hopefully in a way that we mere mortals can understand, at least partially.

Also, because my question was not addressed in the Q&A 50, I'll reiterate my question here, with a sincere hope that my question be will be addressed in Q&A 51:

Once you've brought the latest versions of Unity8 and Mir to mobile devices, will you allocate more resources to bringing a usable version of Unity8 to desktops/laptops?

I ask because I suspect that offering a version of Unity8 usable on desktops/laptops will appeal to a large audience, which may ultimately attract more interest in your mobile project.

[advocatux]

@GizmoChicken hi, just in case you don't know it, there's a group dedicated to the effort to bring Unity8 to the desktop. Please see https://unity8.io/ (you'd be interested too in joining the Telegram group linked there).

[Aurze]

I was wondering, the goal of halium is to unify effort accros linux phone, but we always get update on ubports integration and marius works. I was wondering is the project getting contribution/integration from other comunity?

[Aurze]

On the last Q&A you talk about an issues because we don't use systemd. As most system are switching to systemd, is there any plan/advantage to switch to it?

[Okkie]

@UBportsNews What are the priorities for the core developers at this moment and why is that?

Unity8/mir?
Pinephone?
Porting devices?
Apps?
Foundation?
Bugfixing?
OTA10?
....

Who is working on what?
What is their progress?

What should have priority?

[matv1]

We are so busy with finding, analysing and fixing bugs that we sometimes loose sight. This week it struck me again how good my phone OS actually is. Compared to the last Canonical images, it is so much more advanced and so much more stable. I remember beeing used to Unity8 and OS crashing on a weekly basis. the other day I realised that I havnt seen any of that happen a single time for months. Also, I don't really feel hampered by the absence of a particular app (although ofcourse I too have a big wishlist for both OS and app improvements). This same week I read that the highly regarded Phoronix website named us:
"one of the most viable and furthest along Linux open-source smartphone operating systems". Furthermore, I noticed the UBPorts install vid on Youtube is now coming up to 150.000 views.

Despite all this, as far as I can tell (you guys may know more) best estimates still have us well under 10.000 users running UT as a daily driver world wide. This makes no sense to me.

My simple question is: Why do you guys think that is? What can/should we all do to promote adoptation of Ubuntu Touch? Or, conversely, are you of the opinion that we should just continue improving UT technically and the many will come to us eventually?

[Ghostrider]

@matv1
It's, for me, the same problem like linux distributions, it works very well but sometimes we have to "tinker". An user in 2019 want a user friendly phone. In my opinion UT is a good os but not perfect for daily use, it lacks the settings found on all other os, trivial things such as setting fonts, night mode for all, bluetooth, email management, (I'm a blackberry user, and the hub is really practical) ...

[GizmoChicken]

The show notes from Q&A 40 include the following:

The possibility of the project Treble as a solution.

That could use a uniform API, via a binder, instead of going through bionic and libhybris as we do now. A Linux hardware interface definition layer uses C++ to create an interface. A service starts a device side server and connects to a vendor server. This is in a way similar to the way desktop systems operate.

Is UBports still contemplating whether Project Treble will be of any help to UT? If so, what are the current thoughts?

[Leppa]

@GizmoChicken said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 51 Saturday 1st Of June At 19:00 UTC:

The show notes from Q&A 40 include the following:

The possibility of the project Treble as a solution.

That could use a uniform API, via a binder, instead of going through bionic and libhybris as we do now. A Linux hardware interface definition layer uses C++ to create an interface. A service starts a device side server and connects to a vendor server. This is in a way similar to the way desktop systems operate.

Is UBports still contemplating whether Project Treble will be of any help to UT? If so, what are the current thoughts?

Doing so would require updating Halium to android 8.1/9, which is also required to port UT to most newer phones. Is there any plans to do so?

[Aury88]

@dobey I instead find interesting hear what other developers think. In that discussion I see only your and flohack answers so it can be worthwhile to bring this in a Q&A. also the anwsers in the last discussion on the forum seems different. you say it has no benefit, flohack says only it is not a priority for the moment and given it was one of the milestone I suspect your pov is not necessarily the same with the rest of the ubports foundation developers.

[dotevo]

1. Could you share some statistics about the quantity of the devices with UT? Ex. based on OTA.
   Which device is the most popular? Do you see any trends?
2. Do you plan to integrate Anbox into default image?

[danfro]

Are there any plans to integrate system theme selection into system settings?
Because, well, it is called 'system' theme and it is applied system-wide so I think that is where it does belong to rather than having to use (great almighty) UTTT.

I am aware of the fact that still lots of apps are not (fully) supporting dark mode, but with this setting easier to reach maybe it will help to encourage developers to pay more attention to this.

[Cesar Herrera]

@UBportsNews Will it be included xenial_-_new-bluez in an OTA?

[A Former User]

@alan_g, @UniSuperBox, @mariogrip,

Thank you for providing a route map, and for fleshing it out... A very informative Q&A.

[Leppa]

Will there be a blog-post version available?