NEWS

UBports get-together in Brussels

Firstly, some Community members and Canonical employees held a get together at the Brewdog in Brussels, Belgium on the 20th of September. We hope to have a info and pictures for you in the near future.

Qt automatic legacy scaling support

This week we landed a patch to allow Qt's built-in legacy automatic scaling to be used in Ubuntu Touch. This system assigns an integer scale value to all hard-coded sizes of widgets in Qt applications (for example, a 100100 square gets multiplied to be 200200). This allows apps which are written using QtQuickControls2 (as some Android apps are) to be ported to Ubuntu Touch quite simply!

It also helps with our next topic...

Kirigami2 support

Florian worked with members of the Kirigami2 community to bring the KDE Qt widgets toolkit to Ubuntu Touch! This allows KDE-native apps like Kirigami Gallery to run on Ubuntu Touch. Dalton demonstrated Kaidan, an XMPP messenger using the Kirigami2 toolkit, running on his phone. A Matrix chat group for Kirigami is operating (#kirigami:matrix.org). You can join the discussion there if you wish.

16.04 OTA Update

The automatic upgrade from 15.04/rc to 16.04/rc and 15.04/devel to 16.04/devel is back on track and devices will receive updates to their 16.04 equivalents in the coming days.

It's the little things that make an OS shine, isn't it?

The UBports UI & Graphics team has created a new icon for Ciborium, the External Devices manager for Ubuntu Touch.

Anbox

A new development version of Anbox is now ready !! Added FP2, OPO etc. Performance is improved and is much better than it was with the earlier experimental version. There is a still a lack of camera, GPS, keyboard and other hardware support including Whatsapp at this time. Development is purely at the testing stage so most people should wait for more work on it before having a look. This is bleeding edge software. Please note it requires kernel changes, so a device may software implode. NOT DAILY DRIVER READY.

Anbox Tool is written in Python. This is a completely new approach to staging the Anbox container. You can install and uninstall apk files etc with it. Hopefully, this will attract Android leaning developers who may become interested in developing for us.There is a forum post which covers this subject

What's up with Bluetooth on Ubuntu Touch

UT is not the best with Bluetooth we know that. Calls may stop, volume controls don't work etc. etc. We owe most of our support to the Bluez Project. This is desktop based though so it doesn't always work for us. The Bluetooth world does its own thing which makes for a messy standard. Even Apple and Google have issues with Bluetooth. If they struggle, you can understand why we have problems! Bluetooth will get better, it is important. The problem is with the time and effort required fixing just one device putting a huge drain on our resources. Rockwork connecting to Pebble is one such current issue, also not many developers have Pebbles, so it is hard for us to look at this. We need logs, not just requests ...

QUESTIONS

How do Q&A questions get selected?

Just a quick note on questions in general. Questions are not ignored or edited out maliciously or otherwise. Its just that some topics can take a bit of research and or discussion and so are not suitable to a quick live response. The Q&A forum post is the best place for more involved, technical questions and is available from the Tuesday before the Q&A giving us plenty of time to prepare. Please make full use of this facility.

So onto the questions

tricky - asked. How we can prioritize issues on Github?

Launchpad has an excellent 'heat' function, that reflects the amount of interest an issue gets, but Github doesn't have that.By adding reactions to a Github issue we will try to sort by them when prioritizing issues..Gitlab would help to assist with prioritizing. That is getting some thought but it would be a massive project. We must and will take our time evaluating.tricky also suggested a poll. That could create an impression that we don't care. Open Source development means that popular bids can get ignored. Sometimes things with lots of votes don't get done first. For example a triage reaction maybe required to mentions in the supergroup and common sense - for example a camera that doesn't work.We have 5 to 7 full time equivalent developers, Canonical had up to 200 full time equivalents at the peak of their UT work. Please understand our limitations!If you have the knowledge and skill have a go at fixing a bug yourself

###Einstein - Do the legacy devices also get updates until ota8? Or is the roadmap only for core devices?

Firstly we don't use the term 'Legacy devices' anymore. Only Core devices, which, are fully supported and Community devices, which, as the name suggests are not fully supported by us.The answer though is yes. Systemd was an issue but we are not using it at the moment so don't run into that problem. Older devices may run better because of the new architecture or they may experience limitations. We don't foresee big problems though. Upstream, Ubuntu has moved to systemd so we will have to face it eventually. Old devices fade away gradually though, so that future problem may solve itself.

Geotechland - Will UBports create a PeerTube account?

If there is enough demand for doing that we can certainly consider it. Peertube like Mastodon, is a distributed network. It could be nice. So if you would like us to use PeerTube let us know.The biggest issue is not technical but how many people actually watch it?

Krille - Qtcontrols Gallery looks great. Will it become the default in UT?

Suru can be selected so yes it could be. We have Suru elsewhere in the system already.Rodney is creating Ergo - a toolkit that should be portable between UT and Android and Ubuntu desktop C++ would still be needed a bit. The Ubuntu UI is showing its age, so Krille's idea is certainly an option. The main problem is that Suru styling has lost its maintainer. We need a new one. Please contact us if that's you!

Will we eventually get the use of Flatpak and snaps?

There will be a constant battle between the supporters of one or the other. Supporting both is the best option but both would need a lot of work, especially on systemd and apparmor patches. Flatpak is a vague area and would also need a lot of thinking about.

Could we have a Virtual Trackpad for Libertine?

A cursor following a finger - it is coded for in Unity8 so the underlying support is there but would need mir implementation. Yes, it could be interesting. Must be toggleable though!.

Would an orientation toggler be possible?

Yes that could be done with QtMir.

Thank you for your continuing interest and support. The next Q&A is scheduled for Saturday 29/09 at 19:00 UTC.