And we’ll call it “Phobuntu!” 
Isn’t it ironic that Canonical with all of its clout couldn’t do what Purism has done with the L5? Furthermore that mobile Ubuntu is possible today because of what Purism has done? Makes me wonder where the problem really was.
At any rate, who cares. Thanks Purism and keep on keeping on!
4 Likes
No it’s not ironic. It’s the different mindset. Canonical ended the project to turn to other things that could be more profitable. A lot of the technology that Canonical develops is said to be caused by the not-invented-here syndrome. They duplicate something that already exists, then after some years give up on it and use what everybody else uses. (e.g. Mir/Wayland)
Canonical tried to create their own mobile eco system, controlled by them, with their own desktop stack (Mir/Unity instead of Wayland or Xorg). Trying to mimic Google/Android with their own eco system. Yet another incompatible thing that developers should support.
Purism on the other hand forked an existing Wayland compositor, which might in turn become the Gnome default when Xorg is sunset. They contributed to Gnome, adding mobile capabilities, such that it was adopted by many distros before the L5 was even shipped. They succeeded because making quick profit was not the motivating factor (even though many don’t get that, looking at the price of the L5)
3 Likes
I think you aren’t seeing the whole picture. Canonical is thought to be greedy, but I’d say they are just realistic. It takes money to pay developers to see quality work that is sustainable. Unity was because Gnome was a mess. Canonical doesn’t have to sit and wait to see what the community will drum up. It has a team of developers who are all competent and can churn out work.
I would argue that everything you see as wasted effort was actually Ubuntu simply trying to live up to what it is trying to accomplish. They want the end user experience to be consistent and stable. If the tools that Debian are pushing forward aren’t quite there, they then go and build something themselves. As they open source all of it, it is rather naïve to believe that the work they do isn’t benefiting software elsewhere.
Both Purism and Canonical are under the same constraints: Money. Purism couldn’t wax long about their love of FOSS ideals if they weren’t making money selling hardware. Ubuntu couldn’t sustain its development, likewise, if it wasn’t making money in other ways.
The beef over snaps is irrelevant. New users who come to Linux are turned off the second they need to use software not in a default repo. Snaps are a solution, and I haven’t seen anything else across the sphere that is trying to do the same thing.
I mean the user experience is paramount. Just today, after adding a swap partition back, I started getting the GRUB menu popping up. No explanation, no reason for it. A few searches later, and an obscure command found with grub updated, the situation was remedied. My mom being able to do this, is just not realistic. On top of that, WHY did it even happen. Stuff like this happens all the time. If you add an extension to Gnome and it doesn’t work, there is not an intuitive way to see what went wrong. It is not even that clear how to remove the non-working extension… No matter how capable Linux is today, there are glaring holes in its preparation.
3 Likes
In my opinion, Canonical, Mozilla and Jolla failed at Linux phones, because they tried to just produce the software, and then rely on hardware companies to market Linux phones. The problem is that the phone makers were not fully committed to Linux and didn’t market the phones to the right group of consumers who could appreciate Linux’s unique properties.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the cost of developing a mobile phone in Shenzhen has dropped dramatically since the time when Canonical thought that it would need to raise $32 million in preorders to bring the Edge to market, and Jolla ran into financial problems trying to ship hardware. Both companies gave up on creating their own hardware, and tried to just sell the software, and they were never able to find hardware companies that marketed their phone properly to the right audience.
Another problem was that both Canonical and Mozilla tried to create a lot of their operating system from scratch, whereas Purism has tried to design Phosh as a thin-overlay on top of the existing Wayland+wlroots+GTK+GNOME stack to minimize software development and long-term maintenance costs.
7 Likes
All companies, software developers, designers and usability experts focus on Phosh only now and have all devices be able to run the same OS with ultimate GUI, all apps in a single app store.
Next, apply the Nexus strategy by having a pool of manufacturers showing off what they are capable of by pushing the Phosh devices to highest levels in terms of technology, marketing and awareness/acceptance of the market.
Manufacturers will be shipping out their devices with Phosh before you know it. They have been constrained by Google for too long, so have million of users. Next step for the manufacturers is to make the devices blobless and we should be able to see a major shift in the market.
It will even make DRM companies (Netflix, Spotify etc of this world) aware they need to push their platforms towards RYF in order to maintain their position.
After that fork whatever you want, just make sure the open source is presented as a unified product with excellent basics. From that point forward educate the users what they can do more, so much more with their Linux devices.
Then people will have the choice to what they really want and move away from the Big Techs. In my opinion this is the only way to make open source a success and generate revenues to keep all idealistic parties alive.
1 Like
I don’t think it’s helpful to portray past efforts as failures, partly because each of those efforts continue in some form (UBports, KaiOS, SailfishOS) but also because it establishes a narrative of failure around mobile Linux.
In addition, some of the marketing for Firefox OS was done by operators like Telenor, who sold (or planned to sell) phones based on Firefox OS in a number of markets, like Serbia, Hungary and Montenegro. There was quite a push for developers during that time. Getting operators on board with promotion and outreach has been shown to be important when establishing a new mobile platform, though it remains to be seen if that is still the case.
6 Likes
@2disbetter The following metapackages are also available from Debian Testing:
phosh-core (just the basics)
phosh-full (Everything: games, calls and chatty, other stuff)
phosh-phone
phosh-tablet
So I would image that either they already are available in Ubuntu, or will be soon.
6 Likes
You mean Mobian for Pinephone right? No installer for other phones.
1 Like
Thanks! I think it is largely superficial to run Ubuntu on the phone over PureOS. You can simply point to ubuntu repos and you’d be 90% of the way there.
I disagree, no one in the Linux world wants to be locked into one interface. I have no desire to run phosh and don’t even want it on my phone, I’ll patiently wait until plasma mobile is usable enough to run without crashing.
Interesting, and choosing KDE is not “locking” you in KDE?
Agreed, but that’s not what I intended to word here. Linux distros should be as diverse as possible. What I was referring to is using Phosh as mobile and desktop OS to make it to the mainstream public as it is now maturing and adopted by several market parties.
I have tried and used gnome multiple times before, I hate it, I can’t stand it, I don’t want it. There are other interfaces I have tried and liked to some extent but I always come back to KDE it’s called user preference. By insinuating all developers are focusing on phosh then yes it’s locking you into one interface as there’s only one available that was developed.
One thing I think is interesting is how we have Ubuntu touch, which was supposed to be Ubuntu on mobile. But the L5 with phosh is probably the closest real things to Ubuntu mobile there will be. It is ironic to me that Purism is the company which is basically going to achieve that.
1 Like
And having the same OS whereas Ubuntu and UBports Ubuntu Touch are different OS’s
I’m just the same. KDE only. I never even really “tried” gnome. First thing on PureOS? Install KDE/Plasma 
I only have to interact with GNOME on some virtual testmachines at work. It freaked me out when they introduced this welcome screen where you actually had to use mouse to drag the screen upwards to get to the login screen…
But you know what? That’s not a problem on a mobile device. There, you expect that. Also, in general, the minimalsim of GNOME annoys me, but it’s a natural fit on touch devices. Kate is awesome, but I don’t intend to write scripts on a small screen etc… So, I actually think I might become a KDE-desktop / Gnome mobile user… We’ll see.
1 Like
I’m not a fan of extremely minimalist design for OS, either, because it usually means that all the controls and options are hidden away behind endless sub-menus. click.click.click.click. 
You guys have got me interested in KDE again. I tried it out years ago, to compare it to Ubuntu (pre-Unity Ubuntu), but it just didn’t seem intuitive to me. I had trouble understanding it. It’s probably totally different these days, though.
Agree that minimalism works for mobile.
1 Like
For me its more than that, I currently have quite a bit of functionality and interoperability between my note 9 and KDE plasma via the mobile app for Android. It’s this functionality that I wish to keep and see grow within the Linux ecosystem
KDE is definitely geared more towards those who like to tweak
2 Likes