On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 09:25:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 19:21:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
But can such a powerful phone handle Ubuntu Touch? ;) The
preliminary reviews for the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition, which
you're presumably referencing, are not good, even though the
hardware is spec-ed out, because the Ubuntu software is
supposedly slow and laggy. I was hopeful for the previous
Ubuntu on Android effort years ago, but it never went anywhere.
I bet this one won't either.
Based on my own experience with an Ubuntu phone (it's my daily
driver, and I have the least-powerful hardware of the existing
commercially released phones), I think that the reviews are
just possibly not coming from an unbiased position. ;-)
I don't know that anybody cares about Ubuntu enough to be biased
against it. Vlad Savov said he wanted to like it, but couldn't:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11097126/meizu-pro-5-ubuntu-edition-specs-price-release-date-mwc-2016
Of course, this is pre-release software and likely a newer
version of Ubuntu than what you're running, so maybe they'll get
it all to work well soon, if it did in the past on your phone.
Well, it took us a long time to get on the currently most
popular OS platforms, iOS and Android, and we still have no
apps on there, so I don't think this tiny Ubuntu niche will
get much dev effort. But if you or someone else believes in
and wants to develop for it, more power to you.
Well, if I understand right, the hardest part of the work
(making sure things run OK on ARM) has substantially been done
by you and others. Assuming that works, I would anticipate
that the major part of the requirements would be the bindings
to the Ubuntu SDK.
Mostly others, I just fixed a few ARM bugs here and there: most
of the code needed for ARM was written by David, Dan, Johannes,
and others. Yeah, now that ldc has good codegen for ARM,
including the Raspberry Pi
(https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1283), all Ubuntu
should require is OS bindings.
I do think the Ubuntu offerings are compelling in terms of how
they restructure the phone/tablet experience, particularly in
terms of how they structure things like the security and
permissions models, and the separation between
hardware-interaction-layer vs. core OS vs. application space
and the prospects there for consistent software deployment (and
updates) across many different devices.
Sounds interesting, the Scopes UI seems cool too. I was mostly
talking about the small userbase and how it'd be tough to justify
investing much time into it. But if someone really wants D on
there, that'd be great. :)
