Ubuntu Focusing on Tablets and the Cloud in 2013 202
sfcrazy writes "Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development. The initial builds of Ubuntu for Nexus 7 also showed that, despite popular perception, Unity is far from ready for the mobile devices. In fact quite a lot of 'controversial' technologies introduced in Unity don't fit on a mobile devices such as Global Menus or HUD. So there are many challenges for Mark — redesign Unity for mobile, which may upset users again, get Ubuntu app developers to redesign apps for Ubuntu mobile, get top developers to write apps for Ubuntu... Is it all feasible when companies like RIM or Microsoft are struggling or is Ubuntu becoming a 'me too' company which is not brining anything new to the table and is simply trying to claim a pie?"
Shuttleworth also wants to do something or other with the cloud: "It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
It was fun while it lasted! (Score:2, Interesting)
And now the diaspora of real users who need desktops. It seriously escapes me why everyone is on the race to the cloud and tablets when you need real regular computers to develop the apps for them. Even if tools are available, development on anything but a physical keyboard is a chore.
Re:What about retina? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you find an element of the KDE interface which does not scale, you should report it as a bug!
But the general point is, I guess, that Mark made a big mistake when he went down the GNOME route: picking the technologically inferior option always comes back to bite you in the opensource world.
This is because when everything is free and you are competing for users and developpers, even network efects cannot win in a universe of open standards and source. The best tech wins in the end. Of course, you can keep the bad tech on life support for as long as you have money :)
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Interesting)
What can Ubuntu do on a tablet that Android can't?
Lots of things. Say you have an app built using the LAMP stack; and want to tun it on the tablet. You can't do that on Android since the APM stack is still not good enough in Android. So you either rewrite your app in Android-Java, or run it in a browser, hosted elsewhere on a proper Intel server. But Ubuntu on a tablet would be a better fit in more than 90% use cases.
It's not like tablets are full-fledged PCs
Why not? Like a PC, a tablet has a CPU, RAM, enough storage, and more options for 100% always-on networking than the PC's LAN or WiFi. Many tablets support full USB so keyboards and mice can be connected when required.
Android is just the Linux kernel without GNU; a full fledged GNU/Linux would be a very useful gadget.
Hahaha - Unity even fails mobile (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly Unity is unsuitable for the desktop, so many of us dumped it. We assumed it was designed with myopic focus on mobile, and made jokes about it being for a one meter tablet to be worked with knees and elbows. But now mobile users are saying it is poorly designed for that space also. Canonical needs to toss their UI rubbish in the can, leave that to those who are gifted at it.
I hope Ubuntu becomes viable on tablets (Score:4, Interesting)
I got an Android tablet last week. It is very frustrating. Half of the stuff does not work if you do not have a Google acount or are not willing to tie your device that closely to an advertising company. The one-app-at-a-time UI is constraining. I would much rather a system like APT to manage installed packages. An Ubuntu distribution on a tablet with a tiling window manager and the ability to run Android apps would be awesome.
Re:It was fun while it lasted! (Score:5, Interesting)
("coerced" is probably too strong a term -- everyone in the research group uses Macs, so it was more peer pressure. :P)
Still, I don't see how folks are productive with them. I see people holding the "left" arrow key for five seconds in the terminal to scroll to the beginning of the line since Apple doesn't believe in the "home" key, highlighting things and then doing "command-click, choose copy from menu, command-click, choose paste from menu" instead of having proper middle-click-to-paste support, and other such things that seem a great deal harder than on Linux.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubuntu started by offering candy and jewelry, and now it's getting a little controlling. If we don't leave soon, abuse will be the end result.