Ubuntu Desktop Team Indaba (AMA) - March 31, 2023 @ 4PM UTC

Community UbuntuOnAir
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#1

What is the Ubuntu Desktop Team Indaba? Indaba is a South African term for “a conference or consultation between people”. This will be a live stream event, featuring members of the Ubuntu Desktop Team and members of the community. To get a feel for what to expect, you can review the previous months’ Indabas.

The details are:

When: 2023-03-31T16:00:00Z
Where: UbuntuOnAir - YouTube
Where: UbuntuOnAir - Twitch
Who:

This episode will be all about UBports and the amazing strides they’ve made over the years. Alfred has been around in the UBports space for a number of years and since it uses Mir, we have a resident Mir expert, Alan. So please come and learn about UBports and Mir, and ask any questions you have!

We stream to both YouTube and twitch and we see the live chat in both for you to join the discussion and ask any questions of us. You are also welcome to ask your questions on this thread in advance and we’ll do our best to answer them on air :slightly_smiling_face:

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#2

Looking back at the events do you think Canonical did a mistake discontinuing Ubuntu the way it was done rather than maybe slowly transitioning it to the hands of community?

I think even nowadays it would still be awesome if Ubuntu Touch/UBports were at least mentioned somewhere on ubuntu.com, like other Ubuntu flavors perhaps. It is a very independent project nowadays but Ubuntu is still a base and it would be awesome if Canonical could help with its promotion/support at least a little bit - after all it is its offspring :slight_smile:

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#3

The ubuntu phone project has always been developed outside of the ubuntu archive since the beginning, so it would have been rather hard for ubports to move more into the archive and work like the flavors (they would have wasted all their limited manpower trying to move stuff instead of fixing issues or moving on to a new base) …

Inside Canonical the technology has evolved though, the OS foundation formerly used on the phone has become UbuntuCore, the click packages originally used on the phone have evolved to what you know as snap packages today… as someone who has worked on that system from the beginning in 2012 until today I would have loved to see ubports moving along with us though ( I.e. basing the OS on UbuntuCore and along with that also using snaps for their apps), that way the project would have been way more integrated today…

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#4

Thank you for the reply. I definitely didn’t mean for the UBports to go that way. It think they way they approach the development is great and they do miracles considering the lack of manpower. On the contrary I was trying to suggest some kind of support from Canonical as all these things you mention are true and it would definitely be awesome if Ubuntu Touch got pushed a bit forward. It can be little things as a mention on the Ubuntu site or as you say introduction of Snap packages for mobile.

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#5

Ubuntu Touch and UBports will probably accept any help they can get, both from volunteers and from Canonical.

With that being said, changing the base to Core would be a dramatic change indeed, especially considering some want to spend more time on feature development rather than rebases and migrations. The 20.04 one was already painful. Also, since we use Halium nowadays for hardware enablement and me having spent some time on investigating that Snap-Halium integration dance, it’s still unclear how Canonical wants or would want to approach this. We would lose a lot of shared effort with other projects (Droidian, LuneOS, etc.) and ease of maintenance while being unsure where the Snap adventure would or should go.

But then again, anything is possible. :slight_smile:

EDIT: One way I can see Lomiri or an “Ubuntu Touch”-like experience work out with Snaps is if someone took advantage of Lomiri being available (through Debian) in the Ubuntu archive, providing many of the components that make up the whole experience already.