| Hello community!Welcome to the UBports Foundation email newsletter, October 29th, 2021 |
From your editorThe power of community never ceases to amaze me. I often speak about Twitter as a digital sewer where nice people are bombarded with mis-information. But then my daughter suddenly went to the hospital and my wife send out a small tweet if people would like to send a few cards, just to brighten up our daughters hospital room. Two days later suddenly we received some 25 postcards with moving messages from people we never met before.
Saturday, a week ago, I organised a small UBports meetup in my home town. Four people said they would come and six did. So we had a small but lovely meetup that I had been longing for since forever. Currently over here the covid19 cases are on the rise again so soon we will hear if new measures will be taken. But at least we had a meeting! And the nice energy during that meeting was enough to keep me going again for a long time.
So, thanks to all you in our community. Simply for being awesome.
Stay safe and keep on hacking,
Jeroen Baten
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In our communityOn Saturday, October 23rd, there was a small get-together in the Poortwachter (trans: Gatekeeper), a pub in the city of Culemborg, the Netherlands. It was a small gathering with several people in total, talking about UBports and devices and enjoying each others company. There are some highlights I would like to share. For one, there were way more devices than people present. And one of them was an actual brand new Fairphone 4! Yes, Fairphone is currently working on getting Ubuntu Touch working in their Fairphone 4! There is clearly some work left to do, but there's progress! Can you name all the devices in the next photo? 
This was also the first time that I could use my batch of 3D-printed UBports sun glasses. They anonymize the people in the photo so I can publish the picture without the legal need for a bunch of signed consent forms.
All in all a very nice gathering. Would you like to organize a UBports gathering? We can email people about the event and , if in Europe, I will definitely try to join in the fun myself! Just pick a date and pick a venue and start broadcasting about it. It's that simple!
News hot from the pressJeroen Baten was interviewed on a Dutch podcast by Business News Radio (https://www.bnr.nl/podcast/de-technoloog/10456028/een-open-source-alternatief-op-ios-en-android)
We send out a Dutch press release about the blacklisted words list in Xiaomi phones. It got picked up by several Dutch news outlets. We translated the same press release to English and sent it out to all our international press contacts. If you have read it somewhere, please let us know. At least we got a reply "how can I help?". So that's nice.
Soon we will run a small UBports awareness campaign in the Netherlands. See what message works best in what ad channel. Later we hope to copy what we've learned to other countries. Stay tuned!
Apps in the spotlightHere are some new Ubuntu Touch apps to try out, selected by Mateo Salta and presented in the latest Q&A session: You can find these apps on the OpenStore (https://open-store.io/). Please remember that OpenStore has a built-in option to donate to app creators. We urge you to use that button, so that we'll get more great apps on Ubuntu Touch. | Help needed!If you have some spare time, we could use some help in the following domains: Help still welcome to move to 20.04 and beyond
Our UBports community is growing. We have a lot of volunteers, but for some specific tasks we need to hire specialists. The move to the Ubuntu 20.04 base is such a task.
With Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), you'll be able to run more applications, especially if they only support the Wayland protocol for its user interface. This will make it easier to port desktop apps to run on your phone.
The move to systemd and the support of Wayland will also make Ubuntu Touch more compatible under the hood with other Linux distributions. This will foster collaboration with other mobile Linux distributions such as Mobian, especially on non-Android devices such as the PinePhone and the new PinePhone Pro.
The move to 20.04 is a must to keep getting security updates and improvements for the base packages. The sooner the upgrade has happened, the sooner the UBports developers are able to work on new features such as playing videos protected by DRM and video calling with WebRTC in the browser.
If every member donated $10 a month for some time, this would give a major boost to our growing community.
Donate here so we can hire developers for a better Ubuntu Touch: https://ubports.com/donate |
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 111 (no, not 7!)
Dalton, Florian and Alfred were the hosts of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 111 session. They talked about maintenance of device ports and about their own wish list for Ubuntu Touch.
Porting a device to Ubuntu Touch is a big undertaking, and every port must evolve to keep up with updates. Especially the journey to 20.04 will become a challenge for some devices. The Nexus 5, OnePlus One and Fairphone 2 will need some kernel work. The BQ, MX4 and Nexus 4 won't be supported. And for some devices we're unable to reach the porters to find out their intentions. Please port responsibly.
One of the questions was what features the core developers like to see in Ubuntu Touch. Alfred, who is using a Mac as a development machine, mentioned Handoff: the ability to start working on something on your phone and continue it on your laptop. Florian stated he wanted more polish, refinements and better battery life. Energy saving routines in Ubuntu Touch aren't that optimized compared with Android or iOS. And Dalton speculated that a minimalist Ubuntu Touch with less features could be interesting.
You can watch the whole session and read our notes here: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-111-3786
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