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Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

Even if the Ubuntu Edge campaign doesn't reach its goal, I'm super excited about Ubuntu Touch. I've been running Ubuntu Touch on my Nexus 4 for a while and it is just awesome. Super smooth, great experience and it really shows its potential.

I do hope Ubuntu Edge does reach $32M, but even if not, the future for Ubuntu on phones is very bright.

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Do you think the Edge's hardware will be a major improvement over the Nexus 4?

I am asking because I wonder why I should wait until next year for the Edge when Ubuntu Touch works just as well on a Nexus 4.

It "should" be considerably more powerful as it's designed to not only run ubuntu touch but also a full fledged ubuntu when its plugged into a monitor.

See this video for what that currently looks like on a nexus 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk9-v8Sl4yU Not that nice in my opinion.

A few folks from Canonical on IRC told me that they don't have any plans to support upcoming major smartphones. It sounded like they were hinting at hiring a Chinese OEM to make them a custom branded phone that they would support (but not a brand new phone; just a standard Android smartphone with an Ubuntu logo).

I said that was a terrible idea, and that it would severely limit the number of adopters of Ubuntu Touch, but they basically said "not your problem." True, I suppose, but I hope I misunderstood what they were saying.

Frankly, F/OSS driver support for current smartphones is crap (binary blobs), and for future stuff the future looks bleak (no public driver releases at all from upstream, not even in binary form -- look at the new Nexus 7 shenangians).

To be honest, I don't think Canonical could plausibly support new major smartphones even if they wanted to.

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