Two years ago to this day, Canonical announced the discontinuation of Ubuntu Touch. But, you know, as a valued community member, that we have all worked hard to keep Ubuntu Touch alive and the project is stronger than ever.

We are proud to announce that UBports is now about to be granted the status of an official foundation that is recognized by the authorities in Berlin!

Read our official announcement here:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blog-1/post/it-s-official-the-ubports-foundation-is-ready-for-launch-215

Thank you for all of your support, and we look forward to even better years to come.

TL;DR

• The revised Unity8 and Mir 1.x are coming in OTA-12
• You may wish to switch from the devel to rc release channel on any devices you're using daily.
• We might need to rewrite history on some git repositories. If this happens, we will keep a tag named xenial-before-2019-edge-merge to preserve the history.

The rest

We've been talking about "the Edge merge" for a while, and I understand that it is a rather opaque term to many people. I hope I'm able to answer your questions about what "the Edge merge" really is.

In short, what we'll be doing over the next few days is merging code which currently deploys to our Edge channel into branches which deploy to our normal release cycle. That releases daily into devel, which gets promoted to rc, which in turn gets promoted to stable. The next update on our stable channel will be OTA-12.

In order to understand why this is important, first I'll differentiate Edge from the normal release cycle. Ideally, most of our maintenance and feature work gets deployed into our xenial repository. This repository is used, along with the default Ubuntu repositories, to build the Ubuntu Touch images which land in devel. The Edge images are built with the xenial_-_edge repository overlayed on our xenial repository, allowing us to test large migrations before they impact a large number of users. So, at a base level, Edge is just devel with newer or more experimental packages laid over it.

Currently, we are using the Edge repository to test a huge migration away from Mir 0.24 and Unity8 from 2015 - as deployed in Ubuntu Touch up until now - to Mir 1.x and Unity8 from 2017 - the latter had begun to neglect phone users in an attempt to bring it to the desktop faster. That neglect caused a large number of issues which needed to be fixed. Having these changes built into images for every device every day (in Edge) for months has allowed us to iron out most of these issues.

We will also need to rewrite git history on the xenial branch in some cases, as the phone and desktop platforms diverged enough to prevent them from being merged cleanly. In these cases, we will save the old xenial branch in a tag called xenial-before-2019-edge-merge to ensure the history is preserved.

During this time, we will pause updates to the devel channel for all devices. This will prevent you from receiving an update which could be very broken and, possibly, render your device unbootable. If you don't want to come right onto the bleeding edge when we re-enable those updates, now is a good time to switch to rc or stable using the UBports Installer (don't check the option to wipe your device) or by heading to "Settings -> Updates -> Update Settings -> Channels".

Ubuntu Touch will have many fixes after this merge is finished, but it will also be broken in some new and interesting ways. Our goal as we reach OTA-12 is ensuring that the transition from OTA-11 is smooth. This will involve fixing those new and interesting issues.

Hello everyone,

I'm pleased to report that the first Release Candidate image in the OTA-12 cycle will ship tomorrow (Wednesday, February 12).

RC 2020-W07 image will be the same as what users in devel have today. Please see our open issues board to find what to expect when you update: https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/15

For users of the rc channel, this will begin the weekly release cadence anew. You will find a new update waiting for you in System Settings every Wednesday.

For users of the devel channel, you will see no changes to the daily release cadence.

This brings us closer to releasing Stable OTA-12.

As always, we rely on our users of the devel and rc channels to discuss with each other about interesting findings they have, then move those findings into good bug reports. You can learn more about reporting a bug on Ubuntu Touch at Bug reporting on the UBports Documentation.

Thank you to everyone who has tested, filed, and fixed issues with Ubuntu Touch and the new Unity8 to help us get to this point! We're almost there!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give you an update from the developer team in case you aren't following the development of Ubuntu Touch very closely. To get to it quickly, it seems like we won't be able to deliver an update to Mir 1.0 or higher in Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.

Edit: Most of the problems listed here have been resolved. See https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/10 for more details on what's blocking the merge of unity8+Mir1.1 into the normal cadence.

There's a bit to unpack for this one. The best technical explanation can be gained from others on the team, but you're going to get me for this one.

The big problems

Apps rarely display

The most glaring issue is that apps are rarely able to display anything on the screen. They start correctly and can almost always be interacted with, but only a black box is displayed. Resizing windows in desktop mode leads to many fun effects.

To paraphrase, it seems like there is a race condition in Mir getting a display surface (a box which the app uses to draw stuff) from Android before it has to pass it to the app.

This problem is mainly exhibited on devices with Qualcomm chipsets.

Poor performance

Some actions are extremely slow. When apps display correctly, they have a very low framerate. Pulling out the dock and the app launcher is painful. There really is no excuse for this, newer versions of Mir are much more efficient than our current 0.24.

Interestingly, the performance of the indicators is almost perfect. They feel way better to use than they do under Mir 0.24. In fact, the lowered input latency of Mir >0.26 is noticeable when scrolling around the indicators. This shows us that the failures are within Unity8 itself -- Mir is functioning perfectly.

We should have known

These challenges aren't entirely unexpected. The Android->Hybris->Mir->QtMir->Unity8->QtUbuntu pipeline can't be expected to be perfectly stable when several parts of that stack change all at once. We were over-optimistic when estimating how long it'd take to solve the problems upgrading Mir and Unity8 at the same time would bring.

What's next?

I'll change gears and focus on delivering some more fixes to OTA-8 before wrapping up. Marius will continue working on Mir and other intense low-level issues.

This cycle has included a lot of behind-the-scenes fixes as we've been fixing up automated tests on many components (especially the Ubuntu UI Toolkit -- Thank you Rodney!), allowing us to bring on new code. I've been merging in some rather old PRs (sorry for the wait, everyone who opened those) and I hope to continue to clear the queue for this release.

Tomorrow we'll merge the changes from our xenial_-_edge_-_mir branch into xenial_-_edge. This will cause any Qualcomm devices on the edge channel to experience the problems I listed above (and could cause general instability on other devices). It will be difficult to update Qualcomm devices without having developer mode enabled (which I hope you have anyway, you're on the edge channel). If you are using the edge channel and are not tolerant to these issues (I question how you got on edge in the first place ), please move to rc or stable using the options in System Settings.

If you're not sure whether you're using the edge channel or not, you probably are not. The current release channel is listed in "System Settings -> Updates -> Update settings, 'Channels'"

So, what have we learned this week?

• Everyone wants a home
• No one can agree on what home is
• Some people like the desktop "stuff on your desktop" paradigm, others hate it
• New Unity8 already provides features we're used to seeing on a home screen, but not somewhere that is a home screen

Quite a few shades of gray here. I don't think we'll be able to reach consensus for everyone without just getting in and doing something, then taking the feedback from that. It's really hard to describe dynamic functionality in words and sometimes it doesn't make sense until it's put in front of you.

Personally, I think Kugi said it best early on:

I guess I could live without "home" until we get a great idea that's really a game changer

Let's try some things out and see what sticks, starting at the simplest first. The best ideas will naturally float up and get traction behind them. As they develop past their initial stages, we'll see more development toward interfaces which are consistent at every point.

I must reiterate that (since my job title is "development manager" and I feel the need to protect the time of our paid and volunteer developers) I do not support adding lots more settings or compromising between ideas. I truly believe we can make one really good way to use a mouse, keyboard, and/or touchscreen on any size personal device and the only way we'll do that is by working together. If that is totally not to someone's liking, we are not the only mobile operating system.

So, to put what is next more concretely:

• We may experiment with Jan's idea to tap the background (it's only a few lines of code to change what tapping there does) and ask for feedback from small groups.
• Otherwise, we don't want to make any huge changes to new Unity8 before it is released to Stable the first time. We'll release then iterate.

Go out and make.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for being here, for reading this, for helping us create Ubuntu Touch, and especially for helping others when it breaks. I know that sometimes it seems like the requests for help never end or that people go off into the ether after their threads are solved... but I've watched many stick around, turn around, and help others. It's all thanks to you.

I'd like to open the floor... if you've had anyone that helped you while you were getting started, and you're still here, give them a ping to show them your thanks!

I'd personally like to thank @Flohack and NotKit (who isn't on the forum, bummer!) for greeting me back in September of 2016 and helping me create the ultimately failed Nexus 5X port. Even if my original goals weren't reached, I've had three years of fun and met so many amazing people thanks to your level-headed approach to newcomers. Also, of course I need to thank @mariogrip for the opportunity to dedicate my time to the project.

How about you?

After https://github.com/ubports/unity8/issues/121 was filed and we've had not one, but many sour discussions about this or related topics, I figure we should try to slow it down a bit.

People are getting antsy (read: livid) about the changes to Ubuntu Touch in upcoming releases. In this post I'll try to tackle the issue of "home." More specifically, Where is home in Ubuntu Touch now?

The case for going home

Home, in terms of an operating environment, is the first place where a user arrives and a place they can return to. It's taken many forms over the years of personal computing:

• 7000 BYTES FREE, READY.
• $ (or C:\>)
• Windows' Start menu (Then its Start screen, then its Start menu again)
• Screens which are actually called "Home" on Android and iOS

The concept of Home is slightly different for every operating environment, but it serves a few important purposes:

• It is used to start other interactions with the environment (applications, for example)
• It is "returnable," a user should always know how to get to it. Now that operating environments are used for multitasking, this shouldn't be by destroying all running activities.
• It is "safe," a user should always know what to do once they get there

Home serves as an anchor point for the environment's experience. If the user gets lost or stuck, returning home should help.

The Dash

We can currently assert the following things about Unity8 on a mobile handset:

• Long swiping from the left of the screen always returns you to the Dash.
• The Dash is a window and is shown in the app stack.
• Due to the last point, the Dash remains focused when the device is locked and unlocked.

The dash is home.

The Drawer

The following things about those assertions have changed:

• We no longer have the Dash. Long swiping from the left of the screen opens the App Drawer.
• The Drawer is not a window and does not appear in the app switcher.
• The Drawer does not remain focused when the device is locked and unlocked.

It is consistent with our desktop experience.

But it's got everyone up in arms.

Where is home now?

By far, the most important question I see us asking ourselves (indirectly) is, "where is home now?" The answer... isn't straightforward.

Is the Background home?

Users will land in the Ubuntu Touch experience at the Background (NOT the desktop, which implies you may put things on it):

When arriving at the Background, the Launcher (some call it the dock) appears to greet them. The user may arrive at the background by booting the device or closing all their apps. By offering the Launcher, the background can be used to start other interactions AND it is safe. However, it breaks one of our main rules: There is no way to return to the background without destroying all of your activities.

Is the Drawer home?

The Drawer may be opened by long-swiping from the left of the screen or tapping on the big ol' orange button:

This can be done at any time. This makes the Drawer returnable. It is very simple, so I assert it is safe. And, well, it starts new interactions.

Something about it has people really uncomfortable, though. Maybe it's the fact that, unlike the Dash (or iOS' home, or Android's home), the Drawer is dismissed when you lock the device. This resonates with me a bit, a serial home-presser before locking my device. I like to start at square one whenever I pick up my phone.

Can we find home?

Does this add a new requirement to home? Does home also need to be durable (or comfortable?), lasting through transitions to lock states or other huge events?

Or, is this okay? Is this a case of a different design being more efficient? The ideal use of Unity8 is pinning applications to the Launcher, where they can be managed and switched between (even on the lock screen).

(Maybe the Launcher is home, or the lock screen!)

Home must be durable

If home must be durable, the Background is close to being home. The only problem is we can't return to it easily. There are an infinite number of ways to solve this, here are a couple I've thought of:

Go to background as an app

Hide apps appears as another window in the app switcher. It is always located behind the most recently used app, as shown here.

Go to background as an action

We discussed having Go to background as a specific action you perform on the app switcher. It could also go somewhere else, but there's nowhere to put it. This issue proposes having it be the "Cancel" action of the app switcher, when you tap in the blank space. That caused a lot of upset since it changes the current behavior (tapping in the blank space goes to the app you were just using, today you learned) and is not explicit (as a Python developer, I agree). Here's a way to make it explicit:

(It took me twenty minutes to make that, don't judge me)

Nah, this is more efficient

If home doesn't need to be durable to be home, maybe there is a way to offer an olive branch to people who think it does?

What do you think?

Does home need to be durable? If so, is the Background a good place to have that interaction? Is there a good way to get there?

How do we keep the home interaction consistent between phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop?

Note that "just add another setting to..." is not an acceptable compromise. More customization means more development overhead, makes it more difficult to support users (you might have to do this, or you might have to do that), and takes away from a consistent experience. (If you want to discuss this metatopic, please make another thread.)

Addendum: ground rules

You're talking about a bunch of colorful rectangles, remember. Take your time when replying and keep it respectful and on-topic. This is a good place to brainstorm, but make your ideas concrete with mockups rather than talking about them abstractly.

Edit: The situation is now resolved.

Hello everyone,

I regret to inform you that we made an oversight and allowed the Image Signing key for https://system-image.ubports.com expire. We are working to remedy the issue, but in the mean time downloading updates to Ubuntu Touch is not possible. You will receive a "FileNotFoundError" referencing a keyring file upon trying to update.

Only the on-device image updater is affected. Installing Ubuntu Touch using the UBports Installer is still possible. You may still update apps and use your Ubuntu Touch device normally. Since there has not been a recent stable update, most users are not highly impacted by this issue.

To ensure that this never happens again, we are implementing automatic checking of the image signing keys: https://github.com/ubports/build-scripts/pull/10

This post will be updated as new information becomes available. You may also track this issue at https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1120

I really had no plan for where best to express this information, so here's as good a place as any.

TL;DR: It's not ready yet.

First, some definitions to make sure we're on the same page:

• Roughly speaking, anything that is merged into a xenial branch on a Debian-style package in the https://github.com/ubports organization gets built and released to devel. This is what we mean when we say "edge merge" or anything similar.
• We expect ourselves to ship a release of Ubuntu Touch every 6-8 weeks, including 2 weeks for testing. This gives us 4-6 weeks of "open merge" time in a cycle where low to critical priority changes may be merged. During the 2-week testing period that changes to merging critical priority changes only.
• Releases of Ubuntu Touch move sequentially from devel to rc to stable. That is, Stable OTA-10 is the exact same set of bits as rc 2019-W33/2, which is the exact same set of bits as devel 2019-08-16.

This is the only way we can release software. Changes we merge into a package go into devel which must go to rc which must go to stable. We cannot easily or cleanly substitute in a certain old version of a package, for example. If we merge broken changes, our options are to revert those changes or fix them so they are not broken. That was the cause of OTA-10's delay: we merged some improperly tested changes and believed we could fix them faster than we could revert them. This proved to be false.

To make it crystal clear, if something is broken in devel, it will be broken in the upcoming stable.

I'm fairly sure that it will take more than a week to merge all of the changes from xenial_-_edge into xenial, get the packages built correctly, and get the release pipelines happy again. This takes anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of our expected cycle time, reducing the number of bugs we can expect to fix before we can release again.

I firmly believe "if you add a little to a little, you have a big pile" (attributed to Hesiod). Check out https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/10. It looks like a small pile of things. However, we know that, as very early adopters of the edge software, we are imperfect testers. We aren't going to catch every regression from devel to edge. That's why we release software to devel. Lots of people testing means more bugs filed and higher quality software. In this case, that would add a little more to our little pile. Suddenly it doesn't look like such a little pile of bugs any more.

We don't want to end up with that rush or crunch. It means lower-quality software for you. Our goal is to have the number of known bugs in edge to a minimal point at the start of a cycle so we can take our 1-2 weeks to merge from xenial_-_edge to xenial. Then we can fix the myriad bugs that people will find, because they're better testers than us.

If you want to help us, try out the edge channel and report anything strange you find. This might further delay the merge, but it will ensure a smooth transition and a faster release when the merge does happen.

1. Download the rootfs image from https://ci.ubports.com/job/rootfs/job/rootfs-pinephone/
2. Extract and write the image to an SD card
3. Plug SD card into phone
4. Boot phone

That should do it.

https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch-session/pull/15 should fix this.

No. Not right now.

Aplologies for the inconvenience caused. The issue was indeed a bad update causing the upgrader to clear a directory it should not have. See https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1395

If you are affected by this issue, it is now safe to reinstall Ubuntu Touch using the UBports Installer. You will not lose any data.

@guru, if that is what you feel you need to do, you are free to do so, assuming the forum software allows it. It would be illegal for either service to use your data for any other purposes than stated in their privacy policies, but you are free to do as you wish with your data.

@Capsia, it's also not enabled yet

@guru

No. Among all the administrative headaches that would cause, programmatic SMS is expensive.

Also, have you seen how much spam there is on Telegram? Not a very effective blocker.

The company making Akismet is Automattic, they create all of the things listed here, including Wordpress.com, Simplenote, and Gravatar. Akismet is a paid service for commercial sites and free for noncommercial use. See https://automattic.com/ for more information.

Please note the following text from https://akismet.com/privacy/:

When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet's core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. We do not sell the data you send to the Akismet service, and we do not keep it for long. We have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases.

StopForumSpam is a freely available service contributed to by its users. See https://www.stopforumspam.com/, https://www.stopforumspam.com/privacy, and https://www.stopforumspam.com/gdpr for more information.

Ultimately, the options are thus: we can enable these services for automatic use by the forum software, we can allow our moderators to use them on their own time to manually check every user registration on the forum, or we can lock the forum. The number of registrations on this forum bounces between five and ten per day, with many more during peak times. Waiting for a user to spam and jumping on it as quickly as possible is getting old, and the workload is getting too much for people who have other jobs to do.

We announced this change before it went into effect so people could determine if it meets their requirements and take appropriate action if not. Thank you both for your concern, I hope I've provided enough information for you to make your decision.

Hello everyone,

In response to an influx of spam users on this forum, we will soon enable Akismet for spam prevention. When you submit a post to the forum, Akismet will learn your IP address, user agent, referrer, and the site that you're commenting on (forums.ubports.com). Additionally, the Akismet service may receive your name (if set in your Profile page), username, email address, and comment data.

Users who have at least three reputation points will never be classified as spam on this forum. Users with five or more reputation points may report posts, which will send their content to Akismet as possible spam.

Please see (edit: https://akismet.com/privacy/ and) https://automattic.com/privacy-notice/ for more information about Akismet's privacy policy.

Additionally, we will enable Stop Forum Spam to check all new user registrations. This service will receive new users' usernames, IP address, and email address to check them against a spam blacklist. This checking will not occur retroactively for registered users.

Please see https://www.stopforumspam.com/privacy for more information about Stop Forum Spam's privacy policy.

Hello everyone,

Currently the following UBports services are offline:

• ci.ubports.com
• system-image.ubports.com
• repo.ubports.com

We are investigating this issue with our service provider. Please see status.ubports.com for more updates on this situation, or watch here for when the services are back online.

Lomiri is the name of an operating environment for everywhere. That is all.