Hacker News Reader

Comment by lake99 | Hacker News Reader

> About 1GB of memory is required to run the phone with its default scopes and settings, leaving us about 2GB of space for applications and other features.

I did not see this coming. I was under the impression that moving away from a JVM would have lowered the memory requirements.

A comparison of the two versions of Meizu Pro 5, Android and Ubuntu, would have been useful too. I am curious if the move away from the Android architecture has changed the responsiveness of apps, or affected battery life.

View on HN

According to the Verge [1] : "The most powerful Ubuntu phone is still not good enough, The Meizu Pro 5 has the Galaxy S6's processor, but not its performance"

[1] : http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11097126/meizu-pro-5-ubunt...

As of Android 5, there is only ART, which is no different than using Go, D, or any other AOT compiled language with a GC enabled runtime.

Also many Scopes are actually written in either JavaScript, or QML with C++ and Go as possible code-behind languages.

https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/phone/scopes/

So overall the runtime requirements aren't much different, unless you are writing a pure Qt/C++ scope (without QML).

Ah well, I guess I'll stay with Android for the time being then. I hope they meant to introduce Scopes as a stopgap measure to bridge the app divide to Android and iOS. I don't like this trend of newer (Android) apps needing 20-50MB downloads, and being so bloated for what they actually do.

> I don't like this trend of newer (Android) apps needing 20-50MB downloads, and being so bloated for what they actually do.

Most of those apps are actually written in Qt, PhoneGap, Xamarin, or whatever portable flavour of the month.

Applications written in Java just with the Android Frameworks, are hardly above 10MB in application code, usually the rest are image/audio resources or a collection of the "Java framework of the month" for Android.

Ubuntu Touch actually runs parts of Android in the LXC container. Maybe this is why is not very memory efficient.

https://developer.ubuntu.com/static/devportal_uploaded/13698...

AFAIK, that is just the Android HAL. I can't imagine that part using much memory.

Likewise, how on earth do you manage to make Linux use 1GB of RAM without running Java or some sort of large, memory optimised database?

JavaScript, QML and Go.

Totally agree with JavaScript, it's the new Java except that it's lowered the bar to people that otherwise couldn't write 'applications', which while thats great for learners and education - it means that you tend to get people that are great designers and good at product branding pushing poorly engineered software.

Go however, in my experience tends to be very fast and lightweight.

I don't know anything about QML so won't comment.

QML is something like XAML for UI design, but it is based on JavaScript. You can write a full application in QML if the built in widgets are good enough.

Twenty years ago we linuxheads poked fun at Irix for starting 36 daemons on a singleuser workstation. Or was it 43? Whatever the number, I guess ubuntu has caught up.

Sir, I approve of your comment :)

Ubuntu is the one distro that I wouldn't want to run on my phone, but I'd love a functioning Linux phone that's well setup and maintained, I think the real kicker for me would be able to plug it into a simple dock when I get to work and have my full desktop OS running, but first we need a distro that's more... shall we say 'sensible' or 'tested' taking on that task I think.

I wonder if it has block level encryption and SELinux enabled? I'd hope so.

There's always chroot debian and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

It's Ubuntu, so it'd be AppArmor, and I would say "I sure hope so".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com