As soon as Ubuntu Phone becomes stable enough for daily use, I will switch from Android to it.
Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory, Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.
(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.)
Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop?
Honestly? No. I can't imagine the agony of trying to type out a SQL query on my phone. I have a Macbook Air, which is light enough for me to carry around with me the vast majority of the time- it's great.
If I wanted something smaller I would perhaps get a tablet with a keyboard (or a netbook, if they weren't all terrible)... but doing any meaningful work on my phone? No thanks. I can barely bring myself to type out a reasonably-sized e-mail on mine.
Honestly, I prefer my Droid 4 keyboard to the vast majority of laptop keyboards. I can't begin to describe how convenient it is to have an SSH client with a genuinely good keyboard right in my pocket at all times.
Yeah, the MBP keyboard is not really a fair comparison, but I definitely think the little D4 keyboard is far superior to most PC laptop keyboards, especially the compact ones.
I use my phone right now for sshing into my home machines and getting analytics, benchmarks, error logs, making spot changes to files, editing users and groups, etc. If you have a smartphone with a foldout keyboard, you're set. The possibility of me being able to do this with urxvt and emacs running on the phone is just awesome. Interacting with postgres on the cli with my phone is a dream as well. Obviously writing out huge statements is a pain, but you're generally just running one liners through to find some info.
I guess I can't see the need to do any of those things on a bus, or on the street. It's extremely rare that I would have to do something that couldn't wait for an hour or two until I'm either at work or home.
I have one of those keyboards and it's huge -- bigger than my Nexus 7. I've played around with a bluetooth mouse and that keyboard on my Nexus 7 but it still doesn't seem that great for doing real work.
I think you are right, but just in the current context.. but the way this little mobiles beauties are just getting the same power as our pcs or notebooks.. its just use as a phone when on street, and in home or office.. just plug a keyboard, and a bigger screen.. and there it is.. a computer.. and now for the hardcore stuff :)
> Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.
I used to perform most of these tasks on Nokia phone (yes, right!) - N900. Too bad, it didn't pick up on the market.
>Won't many of the projects in the Ubuntu repositories be unavailable because of architectural reasons, i.e. ARM phones versus x86/64 desktops?
Almost the entirety of Linux userland software is very portable because the server space needs it to run on x86/sparc/power/itanic/whatever. There are exceptions but they tend to be rare and temporary, because hardware vendors don't want customers switching to x86 just because foo app doesn't run on their architecture, and for open source apps the hardware vendors can fix it themselves.
Meanwhile Linux is about the only sensible thing you can currently install on the vast expanse of old PowerPC Macs that can't run current versions of MacOS but can run current versions of Ubuntu or Debian, so any that get recycled into a personal server or a DVR box or whatever will have users pointing out any problems and requesting they be fixed.
And for the most part portability is portability: If you find x86 assembly somewhere and replace it with portable C and an ifdef to use the asm only on x86, or fix an endian issue, you haven't just fixed it for PowerPC or SPARC, you've fixed it for everyone.
This, incidentally, is why having a single architecture is so unhealthy: It promotes everyone forgetting about portability entirely, which prevents new, better architectures from taking hold merely because it's so much more work to port the existing installed base of software.
I run Raspbian, another Debian-based distro, on my Raspberry Pi (ARMv6 CPU) and haven't run into any missing packages yet. Can't imagine there are many projects out there these days that are still architecture-specific, outside of compilers and JITs and so forth, many of which (e.g. LuaJIT, V8, LLVM) already support ARM.
As an example, Yesod doesn't work on the raspberry pi, because GHCi is not in the debian ARM repositories. This is annoying, because compiling everything yourself takes forever on the raspberry.
It should be noted there is a difference between "not in repos, so I have to manually build, but it works" and "there is absolutely no way to run this software on this platform due to the processor".
It is really promising for the current software written against glibc and friends to have all these arm devices running homebrew ARM builds without many hitches.
Especially compared to a platform like, say, Windows, where even though there is an ARM version (Windows RT) which is extremely stripped down and awful on all fronts, there is no software for it because of API compatibility issues and the fact that without open source recompiling most of the Windows software catalog is impossible.
Ah, interesting, had actually looked into GHC and knew there was no GHCi support for ARM (also, ARM is only a Tier 2 platform), but did not realize that made it impractical to use Yesod. That kinda sucks.
Much of the software in Ubuntu is available on ARM today. If you have an Ubuntu ARM device (say, you are running the desktop on a Panda board), you can launch Ubuntu Software Centre and see for yourself.
For a less pretty view (and one that will only make much sense if you already understand how the Ubuntu archives are organized (poorly)), check out http://ports.ubuntu.com/
This sounds somewhat too optimistic? Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd think the majority of people using their laptop for the tasks you talk about would prefer a real keyboard and some usable screen estate over a small screen and slow typing anyday. Might get the job done, but fun is otherwise and it's definitely not the right tool for the desktop job.
I'm pretty sure the parent is being sarcastic. It's wonderfully subtle, though: most people always overdo sarcasm out of fear that it'll go over the heads of most people, which just reduces it to crass snark. This perfectly dances the line.
well thats the beauty, you can just plug keyboard/mouse via usb and hdmi for screen into your phone, ehm desktop-PC - see raspberry pis, cubieboard and so on.
If you're going to use all those adapters & accessories... you may as well just use a desktop or laptop. Which probably already has all those packages you frequently use, and runs them faster.
Who likes traveling with a laptop? As much as a soft-keyboard and connectbot suck, I already commonly use them as a replacement for carrying around a laptop. The convenience of needing a pocket instead of a bag is worth it.
(Also, who cares about speed? It's not like you are going to be rendering or building on it, so even the most modest of smartphones today will be more than enough. We no longer need the latest and greatest to be productive.)
Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory, Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.
(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.)