ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12 September 2016 at 15:16, <mail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

> BACK TO MY POINT --
> Linux didn't achieve the current level of market share by caring about
> what the world thought of it. Nor should Ubuntu Touch developers care.
> Linux won gradually, because it was a good decision and people realized it
> made a lot of sense. The mobile OS market NEEDS Ubuntu Touch, or something
> like it.
>
> "If you build it, they will come."  Yes, actually, this phrase DID work
> with Linux. And it WILL work with Touch.
>

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. However, there is a
difference in that x86 is extremely simple do deal with because it has
things like BIOS/UEFI and ACPI. Phones and tablets doesn't have that yet.
This means that you can't just download and install Ubuntu on your phone
like you can with your PC. Ubuntu must be ported to each device and even
then, installing is much more complicated than just booting from a CD or
USB stick and following the instructions. And if you do it incorrectly,
your phone doesn't work, so it feels rather dangerous. GNU+Linux could grow
because lots of people had the proper hardware and even spare hardware to
toy with. The market was already established. That's not the case with
phones.

When I first started really using GNU+Linux on my main computer, it was
with RedHat 5.0, in 1997, I think. I spent five days getting getting a
desktop working. I spent a Saturday getting the mouse to work. It was very
frustrating and you really had to be seriously dedicated in order to do it.
This is similar to the current situation with Ubuntu for phones, even when
you have a supported model. You need to learn quite a bit just to find out
which OS image to download. The images are there to download and install,
but it's easy to understand why relatively few users actually do it. This
can be made much easier in the future, but it will not be as easy as
installing Ubuntu on your PC any time soon. But that's ok, because if you
don't have the dedication and knowledge to go through that process, you
might not want to use Ubuntu for phones yet, but rather wait for a finished
product.

Because the fact is that Ubuntu for phones isn't finished yet. There's lots
of stuff to do and things can still break horribly. That doesn't matter
much if you have the skills to fix it, but if you don't, then it's a
disaster. The technical challenges of installing it actually protects
people from making mistakes that they'll regret. For many people, $370usd
is a lot of money and if you regret buying it, then that's a big regret and
it's not good PR.

The way I see it, the biggest benefit of Meizu and Bq having sold phones
with Ubuntu pre-installed, is that we now have some confidence in what to
expect. That makes it much easier for you to buy a phone and just install
Ubuntu on it yourself – as you would with a PC. We don't need a large
number of phones in order to prove that the system works.

One last thought to prove my point... look at the success of Cyanogenmod.
> People are willing to risk their device warranty and bricking their phone
> to get it. But what does it offer over the stock Android? Why is it so
> successful? Answer: Security and privacy.  How many of those people would
> flash Touch instead, if it ran on their particular device?
>

Not a big percentage, I think. People who are willing to flash their phones
might be willing to try Ubuntu, but most of the Cyanogen users probably
want a better Android. Cyanogen is that, but Ubuntu is something else.
Ubuntu has to rely on the Ubuntu community. But that's fine; we are many.