Ubuntu Phone is dead.. Long live The Phone!

Mark Shuttleworth writes2 about the end of Ubuntu Phone: apparently NOT "widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry... In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation."

I think he refers to the Gnome community. There are many communities not part of the Gnome establishment.

One of the more promising efforts to bring open-source to mobile devices has been killed.. Wonder why? Closed-source can conceal covert initiatives by folks behind the scenes.

Was this to appease Gnome? Gnome has made no inroads onto mobile devices. Gnome's competitor KDE has done more.

I'm a bit sad that the only promising effort towards a Linux Phone has died. I kept seriously looking at Ubuntu Phone/Tablet, waiting for it to mature1.. even maintaining a few Ubuntu desktops just for this purpose. Unfortunately, their strategy didn't include the wider community. If you didn't have Ubuntu desktop, you couldn't have Ubuntu Phone emulator or dev.

My recommendation to folks on Ubuntu is Xubuntu. Lubuntu could be beautiful and streamlined, but looks ugly right now. When Lubuntu switches to LXQt, my recommendation will switch to Lubuntu.

I was never a big fan of Unity, and an even lesser fan of Gnome, to which Ubuntu has been pushed. I personally think the folks behind Gnome have been, and continue to be, some with the worst attitudes in open-source..

With this, Ubuntu goes back to become one of the also-rans. I don't see what differentiates Ubuntu from any other Gnome distro.


1. http://nixventure.blogspot.com/2015/12/ubuntu-touch-emulator.html
2. http://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence

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