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Ubuntu Cellphones Operating Systems

Ubuntu Touch For Phones Hits RTM, First Phones Coming This Year 132

An anonymous reader writes: In early 2013, Canonical showed the world Ubuntu Touch, a version of Ubuntu developed specifically for smartphones. Now, the mobile operating system has finally reached "release to manufacturing" status. (Here's the release announcement.) The first phone running Ubuntu Touch, the Meizu MX4, will start shipping in December. "Details are scarce on its hardware, but a leak from iGeek suggests the Pro variant may have a Samsung Exynos 5430 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 2560x1536 resolution screen. ... This more powerful hardware is good news if true, and it bodes well for Ubuntu's vision of computing convergence." Softpedia has a preview of the RTM version of the OS. They say performance has improved significantly, even on old phones, and that the UI has been polished into a much better state.
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Ubuntu Touch For Phones Hits RTM, First Phones Coming This Year

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  • by kthreadd ( 1558445 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:38AM (#48013291)

    Will Ubuntu Touch for Phones include spyware, like the shopping lens that they ship with the desktop version of Ubuntu?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It sounds like you're using the wrong version. Install Kubuntu [kubuntu.org] instead of Ubuntu. You get a better, more powerful, more customizable desktop environment, and no "shopping lens" spyware.

      Also, donate a few euros or dollars to them so they can keep doing it.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @08:32AM (#48013467)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
      What shopping lens? I can't find it in Xfce's menu.
  • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:54AM (#48013345) Homepage Journal

    No doubt the GUI will be optimised for a machine with a keyboard & mouse.

    • Re:Desktop GUI (Score:5, Insightful)

      by X10 ( 186866 ) on Sunday September 28, 2014 @08:01AM (#48013359) Homepage

      I wish Canonical would concentrate on making a linux for the destkop with usable UI. Every move they make towards tablets, touch pc's and phones makes Ubuntu worse for desktop users. Which are also the people contributing most to Ubuntu.

      • I wish Canonical would concentrate on making a linux for the destkop with usable UI. Every move they make towards tablets, touch pc's and phones makes Ubuntu worse for desktop users. Which are also the people contributing most to Ubuntu.

        I do not see anything terribly wrong with the user experience of Unity. It is quite close to a typical Windows or Mac desktop and not a "mobile UI" like a lot of people claim.

        • People were calling it a touch UI when it required mouse hover to bring up certain menus.

          People are idiots.

        • Honestly I gotta agree with this. I mostly am doing one thing and like having that task take up the whole screen. Unity does this better than anything else. Sometimes I'll multitask and have two windows side by side or will alt-tab between them. Really freakin easy in Unity to do this as well. Unlike Gnome it doesn't waste horrendous amounts of space on title bar padding either. Unity and Ubuntu in general get more flack than they deserve, IMO. Now, I actually use Arch because I prefer rolling releas
    • by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday September 28, 2014 @08:41AM (#48013501) Homepage Journal
      Back when Canonical was trying to push Ubuntu for Android, the idea was that you'd get the normal Android GUI while mobile. But when you plug in an HDMI monitor and pair a Bluetooth keyboard, you'd get an X11 desktop. In theory you wouldn't even need a mouse if you're satisfied with using the device's screen as a trackpad.
  • If you follow all the links (I know, this is slashdot, who reads the summary, never mind the links from the articles to their sources). the Meizu MX4 will be shipping with Android 4.4 (Kitkat). The whole "RTM" hype from Canonical is just that - hype, same as the "Ubuntu TV", the "Ubuntu EDGE Smartphone", the "Ubuntu Cloud", whatever. This phone will come stock with Android. The vendors will be stocking the Android version, because that's what's going to sell. The carriers sure as heck don't want to be

  • Ubuntu for Android (http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android) was a hybrid Ubuntu/Android OS that promised to allow you to use Android as the phone OS, then plug your phone into HDMI and a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard and have a full Ubuntu experience running alongside. It was announced with a lot of splash and got a lot of people excited. The ability to use a phone as a desktop computer on the road was very enticing. But it never materialized, and the source code was never opened (even though it is supp

  • It would be more useful to go the opposite way - keep Ubuntu the same, just add QWERTY keyboard to the phone. Otherwise we have to pay for our own phone manufacturing - Neo900 [neo900.org].
  • First, let me start off by saying I use to be very "pro-ubuntu". It was a great distro, and one of the few you can just throw the CD in and reboot into a usable system fairly quickly.

    Then they seem to flounder around and lack direction so i moved to MINT. Of the 6 desktop PC's in my house, at one point 5 of them ran Ubuntu. Now three are MINT, two remain ubuntu and one is still on windows.

    Ubuntu seems to be suffering a bit of the classic "floundering around" you often see in the opensource world. Instea

    • The mobile touchscreen world probably needs a linux OS. Thing is, there are some many of them (some were corporate like Intel, Samsung, Nokia) but they are nowhere to be seen in the real world. So maybe it's not so bad that Ubuntu is doing an almost available one, which is closer than the other ones were.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Much rather have a gentoo phone

  • Didn't we all hate Microsoft for pursuing the convergence roadmap? (Desktop -> Tablet -> Phone)
  • I have it running on my Nexus 5, and it has come a long way. Just two or three builds ago (241 I think?), scrolling was slow and choppy, swiping between screens was laggy, and touch sensitivity was way too low. Text was hard for me to read (due to font hinting) and "apps" felt like they took forever to open. But the RTM release turned all of that around. It's actually a pleasure to use, and not only do I use it as my DD, I actually removed my CM backup. I'm not saying it's the best OS ever (there's still p

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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