14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has unblocked the promotion of stable images of Ubuntu Touch after solving a few problems that were causing the delay.
The Ubuntu developers are working on several branches for the phone and tablet version of the operating system, and they are making constant improvements. The system is currently based on the upcoming Utopic version and it's still under development.
The two platforms, desktop and mobile, don't share the same code yet and there are some big differences between them. This means that Ubuntu Touch based on the Utopic branch is actually more stable than the desktop counterpart. Also, it's important to note that these projects are not co-dependent.
“After some discussion among our landing team, we decided to whitelist the filemanager autopilot failures and unblock image promotion. The problem is really hard to debug especially because the main upstream developers have no hardware to test it on. Problems with this test suite were visible from the very beginning of the utopic series as well, so it was no particular landing that could have caused the flakyness to start.”
“With this being said we decided to promote a new image to the stable channel today! Image #83 passed both our dogfooding and smoketesting criteria. It includes the revert of the split greeter, moving the feature back to Unity8's territory. This should decrease the memory-load of your Ubuntu Touch back to the previous footprint,” says Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak in an email update.
Canonical is getting closer to the official release of the first devices powered by Ubuntu, which should happen this autumn, if everything goes according to plan. The developers already said that they were working to provide a RTM version of Ubuntu, which should be very stable and bug free (as much as possible).
The first two companies that have been announced as official hardware companies are Meizu in China, and Bq in Europe. There are no certain dates for the launches, but Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) is expected to arrive on October 23, which is an interesting coincidence.
Users can test Ubuntu Touch right now if they have a Nexus 4 or a Nexus 7 device. Installing the operating system is pretty easy and it's possible to keep the Android operating system. Users will also be able to import their Contacts and Calendar from Google, which makes it very easy to switch to Ubuntu Touch without any major problems or issues.