Ubuntu: One OS, one interface, all devices
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Every time I hear someone advocating this kind of "convergence", I imagine the dashboard of a Toyota Corolla installed in the cockpit of a 747, or the control panel from a blender transplanted onto an air conditioner.
Why do devices that do different things in different ways need to be interacted with in the same manner?
I came here to say basically the same thing, except you put it much better than I would have. I love the Corolla / 747 comparison. That really gets to the essence of it.
Here's a thought... how about vendors of desktop OS's focus on creating the best possible desktop experience, vendors of tablet OS's focus on creating the best possible tablet experience, etc.? And where there's a happy bit of confluence between those two goals, then exploit it - otherwise, embrace difference and make the best experience for the people who are actually using your product at a moment in time, as opposed to the best experience for "people who are using this and people we hypothetically think might also use this, but on a different device"?
I've always had the mindset that Fogbeam Labs would probably not ever get into the OS business, thinking "Red Hat, Canonical and Novell do a good enough job as Linux vendors" but I swear, sometimes, I find myself wishing we had the resources to throw at a desktop Linux distro.
The problem is some are trying to use the exact same interface everywhere, and that can be a problem. It could work well enough on one type of device, but be very frustrating on another.
I'm not sure which category Ubuntu represents yet, because while the article says one interface, from the videos I've seen Ubuntu Touch kind of has its own UI. The only thing that is exactly the same is the icon bar.
These are very different devices, and yet they use the same interface, meaning that you don't think about what you want to do, you just do it.
For MOST people, that same mentality can scale upto their desktop, onto their television, etc. etc.
I live in a city where cell phones are stolen at the same rate as bananas are picked by monkeys in Congo. No matter if you are poor or rich, owns a cutting edge smartphone or a $15 one you bought at a newsstand, someday you will get it stolen. My legal manager got so many phones stolen in the past years that she lost count them. Her wild guess is they were more than 20. All cheap ones, because after you loose the first couple of good ones you are forced to adapt.
As the storage capacity of those phone increase, I think we will be motivated to keep more things in it. In case you have it stolen, damage is done.
Yes, you can still sync it to some other backup desktop PC, to your media center in your living room, or even to the "cloud". But imagine effort involved to restore those GBs of data every time you lose your phone. It is not only material damage, but time/effort damage as well.
I currently use Prey on my Android, so at least I could block the phone and force the other guy to hard reset it. I'm protecting my privacy but not relieving the time/effort issue, nor the material one.
What I REALLY would like to see on a new "built-from-bottom-to-top" device is a "brick token", a string of characters I could dictate to the carrier agent on the phone 1 minute after my phone was stolen and that alone would turn the device into a brick for good. Something at the lowest architectural level... like spilling acid on top of the main board. That would really change robbers crime lives, and bring tranquility to us consumers. Until something like this is in place, I'll be glad to have my PC and phone being two different things.
It is only an _additional_ option, which, I guess, is supposed to be the thing that creates revenues for them, by giving you an incentive to use their cloud service.
(Personally, I will certainly refrain from using any type of cloud, after Snowden's revelations, but that's another story.)
One of the things I've learned is to learn from other peoples mistakes
(for reference to make sure I'm not written off as a Linux shill, I was MCSD cert for the best part of a decade, own an Xbox 360 and a Lumia. Metro just doesn't work on the desktop for me).
The idea of convergence is a seductive ideological fabrication of Eurowestern making.
While seductive, there is a tremendous body of history to examine to reveal the fallacy of the position.
Automobiles, cellular phones, portable cameras, pencils and pens, floor coverings, building designs, gardens, aircraft, etc. Every single example grows in diversity and complexity away from their base initial forms.
Design appears to begin at a singular starting point and grow in diversity as needs evolve[1].
Only a superficial study of design history would struggle against firm historical evidence of divergence.
“…these examples reinforces my thesis that in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function.” - Bill Buxton
[1] Apologies for the apparent forcing of Eurowestern metanarrative arcs onto phenomena where no such arc may exist.
We're just putting a desktop OS in a smaller box than ever like we have for the last decade.
The ease of this transition is reinforced by the fact that GNU/Linux systems already work really well on all of these form factors(and many more).
Would you have said that a phone should not have a camera? Or a phone should not try to do scheduling? Be an alarm clock? etc.
Is it reasonable that a photographer would prefer a cellular phone camera over a focused device? Or a medical imager? Or a security system designer? Or an astronomer? Or an extreme sports enthusiast? The point stands that the technology diverges to meet contextual needs.
Following this reasoning, we can wager on two futures. One where we use less devices and less things. Or one where we use more specific devices that meet contextual needs more acutely.
I comfortably accept the latter. Design exists in a multi-dimensional realm where some design decisions may inherently pull away from others.
Unless someone wants to believe in a car that seats six, goes from zero to sixty in four seconds, has a child carrier area, ravages off-road snow conditions, and offers an upgrade to carry six sheets of plywood.
Bill Buxton's analysis of wooden Inuit coastal maps is fabulous, and I would encourage reading his piece if you can find it.
The stats speak for themselves from MSFT's Windows 8 numbers, for the most part people aren't buying Windows 8 except for new PCs which is a forced purchase.
Ubuntu, by contrast, isn't going to artificially nerf their products for a certain architecture or to segment the market. Having the same capabilities, and a common, but adaptable UI, is going to serve Ubuntu well.
I'm willing to cut Ubuntu some slack on Unity and Mir. Despite all the haters, the latest Unity is actually turning out to be a decent UI. For those of us on 16:9 monitors, a vertical taskbar was the right choice. Vertical taskbars were broken for over 10 years GNOME[1], so I can understand Shuttleworths frustration. I also love the search bar lense UI.
The mistake they made was shipping Unity half-baked. Yes, it can get unresponsive on low-end hardware. But much of this comes from poor 3D driver support under Linux, and bloated, slow, and outdated X[2] and compiz. The sooner those two die, the sooner we can have a responsive modern 3D accelerated compositing window managers under Linux.
I have not yet had the opportunity to explore other form factors, although fat fingering most GTK3+ apps would not be fun I imagine.
I am currently 'on the bench' regarding Unity after 12.04 until bug 739184 [1] is addressed. This makes keyboard oriented use of LibreOffice impossible, ironic given the keyboard orientation of Unity.
I hope 14.04 addresses this issue and also supports nvidia proprietary drivers (or runs nouveau at a reasonable speed) [2].
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/7...
My deal breaker is that it knackers virtualbox mouse input when running a windows guest meaning you lose all mouse move events.
I actually prefer the Unity launcher and its permanent visibility, but, as I spend a small proportion of my time using the desktop features and most in a Web browser and Office package, I'm 'on the bench' until the menus get sorted in LO.
I have not tried either Shell or Unity on a tablet device, and I have reservations about the extent to which one UI can handle the 'dynamic range' of displays from pocket sized to wall sized.
On the other: As a huge fan of NetBSD (which is portable across nearly 60 architectures), if Ubuntu can learn lessons (and share them) from this work and apply to it whatever they think their core competency is, more power to them.
Probably not
How often do you need/want to upgrade your PC/Phone/Tablet? Those probably have a fairly regular cycle.
What about your TV? Monitor? Keyboard? Other I/O devices (ignoring that we've had a resurgence in monitor technology in the last few years). These things don't have as consistent an upgrade path.
If rather than upgrading your PC AND phone AND tablet on a 18 month - 3 year cycle, you just upgraded one small device every 24 months. You still use the same monitor and keyboard, your tablet screen (which I suspect the tablet will become little less than a touch screen with built in camera and I/O to run the OS) and other devices. You're saving quite a bit in resources. One 'local' drive that you carry with you, and a bunch of cloud storage, all your apps across all your devices, no logging into a service on device X only to find that when you go to device Y you have to login again, but you've forgotten your password so you reset your password which means that you're not logged out on device X. Etc. etc.etc. there is value.
After all, I don't have two lights in every room in my house just in case a light bulb blows, I just buy a pack of lightbulbs.
In the case of a drive failure, there should be a way to recover data loss, but this shouldn't be ever present and visible.
As far as simulataneous device usage - I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Most brains can be thought of as single threaded working with multi-threaded multi-core parallel executing devices. The limit in doing multiple things at once has always been biological in my case. For things running in the background - this can be done with current technology.
I definitely will:
This is probably the best open mobile OS alternative, right after FirefoxOS.
But we'll have to see if this approach already fits the bill or not. (Encryption is just 1 use case that comes to mind where you'll still have to rely on native applications, to get the best possible security.)
EDIT: I just read that Ubuntu actually supports _both_ approaches: HTML5 apps AND native apps. Therefor, it should actually be able to attract more developers.
If Ubuntu Edge succeeds, I can't see why application developers will not jump ship towards ARM.
ChromeOS/Android: One OS, one interface, all devices
Windows: One OS, one interface, all devices
All three of the above companies have been moving in this direction for quite some time. Everybody wants to do it. Canonical is always two to five years late with any trend.
Er, have you ever _seen_ a Mac or an iPhone? Hint: Not one OS, not one interface. Two OSes, two (or arguably two-and-a-half; iOS on iPads is more different than it looks at first glance) interfaces. Fortunately. iOS on the desktop would be dreadful, and I can't even get my head around how MacOS on a phone would _work_.
Mac OSX and iOS are not the same OS, nor do they have the same interface. Using the same core/kernel doesn't count. By that logic Android is the same as Ubuntu. It obviously isn't.
Chrome OS and Android are not the same OS, nor do they have the same interface.
Windows 8 has mostly the same start screen - quite different UI everywhere else. They are also not one OS, just use the same core, as iOS and Mac OS X do.
Ubuntu could get the closest to this vision, because they have the phone OS integrated with the desktop OS. And I guess Android could, too, if Google commits to Android on desktops eventually (I think they normally would, but I have no idea if they will and when, because of Chrome OS).
They simply saw Apple success, and adapted. The goal of every company now is to be the portable leader, and abandon the PC ship. It worked for Apple because they have never been competitors in PC space. The same for Google. MS is taking a long gamble, but they are the PC leader and have the most to lose.
Going back to convergence: Google wants just a browser as the desktop OS, and that's not convergence at all, unless you think Responsive Web Design is convergence. Microsoft is the one doing something a little similar to Ubuntu, but their OS can't do desktop and portable/touch well at the same time. Or actually, their OS can do both, but it is designed in a way that no application can do both, and that hurts developers.
What makes you think that? Certainly Apple has shown no real signs, beyond adopting phone-like scrolling direction on the desktop by default. Windows 8 is somewhat more converged, but I doubt they're going to push that much further, and realistically, given poor user response, they'll probably quietly reduce it over the next few versions.
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P.S. I mean this as a real question, not just or particularly to sound snarky. With other Canonical-hosting devices, I recall reading about Android kernels and the like. I don't know enough, myself, to determine the answer to my question.
You need to spend a lot of money to offer a better deal than government surveillance budgets have given hardware manufacturers.