14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 has officially been released as the “largest release ever,” coming with massive improvements versus its predecessors, but also with changes that we’ll detail below.
First and foremost, the highlight of this new release is the full Unity8 experience, as the dev team explains that importing of Canonical’s final changes is now complete.
Unity8, codenamed Lomiri, is supposed to help ensure a more reliable experience going forward, “helping us avoid introducing new bugs or triggering old ones again.”
Working LED notification
There are also changes regarding the version of Mir that is bundled with Ubuntu Touch.
“We upgraded from Mir 0.24, released back in 2015, to Mir 1.2, released in 2019. This newer version of Mir features support for Wayland clients! This support is not currently available to our Android-based devices due to a missing implementation, but mainline devices such as the PinePhone and Raspberry Pi are already using Wayland. Best of all, upgrading from Mir 1.2 to 1.8 (released in April 2020) should be much easier than going from 0.24 to 1.2 was,” the release notes read.
There are also new colors that are supposed to offer a better contrast between the displayed text and the background, as well as keyboard improvements, including a bottom-swipe gesture to jump from the keyboard to the editing overlay.
The browsing experience has been polished as well, so beginning with this release, the private mode works as expected and deletes only the browsing session when closing, not all data as it happened in the past. Plus, users are provided with an option to delete cookies, as well as with a series of other small improvements here and there.
The LED notification light has also been activated, so you’ll see the light blinking orange when the battery is low and stay solid white during charging. The OnePlus One vibration also works when typing.
Clearly, this is one major release that’s worth trying for those looking for a more refined Linux experience on the phone. Updating an Ubuntu Touch device to the new version is possible from the Updates screen.