14 DAY TRIAL // Following on the shocking news that Canonical stopped the development of the Unity 8 user interface, along with its Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu Tablet, and Ubuntu Convergence visions, UBports Marius Gripsgård prepared a Q&A on YouTube.
We already told you last week that the UBports founder made the very bold decision of taking over the development of Unity 8 to provide better support for various of the devices on which users can install the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
In the Q&A, which you can view entirely at the end of the article, Marius Gripsgård talks about some of the short-term plans he and his crew over at UBports made to keep Unity 8 and the Mir display server alive. For starters, they'll only do some basic maintenance, as there's no need to make any major adjustments.
Mir could run on top of Wayland, legacy mode support for BQ phones
The UBports team will also try to run Mir on top of Wayland, something that according to Marius Gripsgård is the project's best short-term solution for the Mir problem, as maintaining their own display server is a huge job. Technical details are available in the first few minutes of the video.
In the meantime, they'll eventually have to make their own server infrastructure for providing .click packages to those who are still using Ubuntu Phone and Tablets and want to install apps, as most probably Canonical will terminate its Ubuntu Store for mobile very soon.
Furthermore, UBports will need to up their updates infrastructure by implementing a better system for providing updates to the Ubuntu mobile community, as well as to improve the way system images for various devices are offered to users. In the same manner, UBports promises to provide legacy support for older devices.
These include the BQ phones, as they are the first to reach end of life. Users of BQ Aquaris E4.5, BQ Aquaris E5, and BQ Aquaris M10/M10HD devices will still receive updates as they received until now from Canonical, but it doesn't look like they'll be upgraded to the newer Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) base, except for BQ Aquaris M10 devices.
We recommend that you watch the entire one and a half hour video if you're curious to know what people on the UBports IRC channels asked Marius Gripsgård and the UBports team about their upcoming plans to keep the Ubuntu Phone vision alive for as long as they can.
