Canonical Ends Convergence On Ubuntu

[Lucian Armasu]

Canonical announced that it will stop developing some of its multi-year projects, including Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets, its Mir display server, and the Unit 8 interface for the desktop.

Canonical Ends Convergence On Ubuntu : Read more

 

[Bloob]

A pity and a relief. It is good to try and innovate, but when there already are good solutions available, the wise move is to adopt them.

 

[coldmast]

Right idea at the wrong time. For mobiles devices the app store is all. I don't know where Canonical thought it was going to succeed where Blackberry and Microsoft had failed.

 

[thomasjames]

oh my god. FINALLY. after years of CRIPPLING and costly mistakes and immense, *VAST* duplications of efforts with ubuntu custom-everything, sanity will prevail. i am so happy i could cry. props though, takes a man to admit he was wrong rather than simply step down. however, let's move on, please step down and pass the ball to someone with a more mature, realistic view on the future. miguel the icaza would be the natural choice.

 

[Dosflores]

The funny thing about this convergence fad is that Apple has been proven right in the end, but they were advocating for non-convergence just because they want you to buy as many Apple-branded products as possible. Why would you offer the same functionalities on both the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro if you can sell both to the same person?

It's funny too that Microsoft gave up on Windows 10 - Windows 10 Mobile convergence, and now Samsung and Google have taken their ideas and implemented them in a seemingly convincing way in the Galaxy S8. Many people don't need the level of performance that only a PC can provide, so maybe Android can make Windows 10 completely irrelevant for them. I'm curious to see whether some manufacturers will launch dumb terminal laptops that can connect via USB-C to the Galaxy S8, and let you use Microsoft Office for Android comfortably enough.

Well, now I have a good reason to look forward to Ubuntu 18.04. Gnome surely looks much better than Unity nowadays.

 

[Orgin]

@Canonical, how about officially supporting android apps in Ubuntu? That's the whole convergency you need really.

 

[randomizer]

So 18.04 will have the most dramatic change in UI for Ubuntu in a long time. I used to enjoy seeing what they tinkered with in each release, but releases in recent years have been quite incremental and boring.

 

[Bloob]

It's funny too that Microsoft gave up on Windows 10 - Windows 10 Mobile convergence

Did they really?

 

[SockPuppet]

I'd rather just use Windows where everything just works and I don't have to interface with the worst tech community on Earth to get answers to simple problems.

 

[Dosflores]

It's funny too that Microsoft gave up on Windows 10 - Windows 10 Mobile convergence

Did they really?

Yes. For the moment, at least. Currently, Microsoft is much more interested in convincing companies to use the Desktop Bridge to bring their Win32 applications to the Windows Store. Windows 10 Mobile can't compete with Android and iOS, but Windows 10 is certainly able to compete with macOS. Some people would say that W10 can't compete with W7, but Microsoft already took care of that by not supporting Zen and Kaby Lake on W7.

Microsoft's greatest ambition is simple: every PC uses W10, and every application is distributed through the Windows Store. It looks a lot more profitable than asking companies to implement support for Windows 10 Mobile.

 

[linuxgeex]

The author proves his ignorance of Snaps by blathering about security FUD instead of speaking to the actual functional differences between Snaps and the common packaging methods of Linux distros.

Snaps run their apps in a chroot jail with all their dependencies included, so you can for example install multiple versions of the same app on your system. Want to try the latest Firefox with Electrolysis and still keep an older version without it running at the same time so you can keep all your extensions? Snaps will let you do that.

As the author points out, Snaps are not a magical security bullet that solves other security issues, such as the vulnerabilities of X, or of the kernel itself for that matter. However for Snap packages (not apps) which don't make use of a display, ie Redis or other services, Snaps are inherently more secure than .deb or .rpm simply because they isolate the service from the distro in a similar manner to OpenVZ, LXC, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, etc.