Ubuntu Touch Q&A 62

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 62

Edge merge is complete

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News and Update

Edge merge is complete

This week were present Dalton, Jan and Marius.

Unity8 from 2017 (plus many patches) and Mir 1.x have arrived in Ubuntu Touch releases on the devel channel. Read more at What's this Edge merge anyway?

OTA-12 is off to a great start even without these changes, with fixes to private mode coming in this week.

Ubports Installer 0.4 has been released

After months of effort to refactor and re-implement parts of the installer, Jan was pleased to announce the release of the UBports Installer 0.4. This release features a new task-based config file format that allows the Installer to act on many types of Android or Android-like devices. It also makes the Installer far more versatile, now able to install custom Android distributions and Ubuntu Touch alike. It can even boot AsteroidOS on a smartwatch.

The config file format has enabled us to bring support for the Sony Xperia X and Oneplus 3 (and 3T) to the installer as well. Both of these devices have very advanced (but not yet perfect!) hardware support and installing is easy with only a few clicks. For more information, please see the respective threads for the Sony Xperia X and Oneplus 3(T).

64-bit ARM images are surfacing

64-bit ARM devices have been around for a while, but Ubuntu Touch has always run in 32-bit mode. More recent device bring-up efforts have shown us that having 64-bit ARM images is far more useful than previously thought, and not just for devices with greater than 4GB of RAM. Devices running in 64-bit mode are able to launch apps faster, use more features of the CPU, and perform more optimizations. The downside, however, is that apps need to be compiled for 64-bit support.

The Xperia X and Oneplus 3(T) now have 64-bit images available, but they must be installed through a more advanced procedure than with the UBports Installer.

TELEports 0.6.0 released

The TELEports team has been working hard and they are proud to release version 0.6.0 of the Ubuntu Touch-native Telegram client! TELEports 0.6.0 includes many improvements to the content sharing system, allowing users to attach more than one file to a message and share content from other apps to TELEports (rather than only being able to "pull" that content). It also adds the Telegram contact list, where you may store or edit Telegram contacts or jump to your conversation with them. A highly-requested addition, a button to snap to the most recent message in a chat, has been added as well.

For a complete changelog for TELEports, see its CHANGELOG.md file .

Sponsors were thanked.

Questions

The News section of the forum is the best place to pose questions for the Q&A. YouTube live chat, Telegram and Matrix are other places to post a question.

Due to the huge question load this time and the complexity of the answers, we'll provide links to the relevant portions of the video and the links which were posted in live chat about the section.

[00:16:29] How did you react to GitLab's (retracted) plans to include third-party tracking?