Based on Wayland and the GNOME 3 application stack, Phosh is being developed by Purism, creators of “Librem 5” Linux phone. Phosh (PHOne SHell) is a desktop environment for Linux based mobile devices. If you have a supported device or you want to try Ubuntu Touch on an x86 device, you can download installers from its official website. It also comes with its own app store containing many useful apps and utilities. Ubuntu Touch supports many ARM based devices and x86 support is also being worked on. Recently, Ubuntu Touch was renamed as “Lomiri”. Ubuntu Touch is primarily a mobile OS, but it supports convergence and desktop mode as well.
Thus Unity8’s development started again and it became a community project named Ubuntu Touch. This same project was then picked up by a group of volunteers and open source enthusiasts. Unfortunately, Unity8’s development was stopped by Canonical for various reasons and the device was never released. Canonical also tried to launch a mobile device with Unity8’s convergence model. In other words, Unity8 provided such an interface that any Ubuntu device you carry in your pocket could be converted into a full-blown desktop Linux PC as soon as it was connected to a larger display. Maintained by Ubuntu’s creator Canonical and based on Qt, Unity8 aimed for convergence where the running desktop environment would automatically and seamlessly adapt for small and large screen devices using responsive, mobile first elements. “Unity8”, a variation of the Unity desktop environment, was in development for quite a few years. Most of these environments are currently in pre-alpha, alpha, and beta stages of development. This article will list user interface environments that are optimized for mobile and tablet devices based on Linux.
Desktop environments shipped in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are currently not optimized for small screen touch based devices. These devices are mostly based on the mainline Linux kernel, with patches and some configuration changes. This can be mainly attributed to the advent of Linux phones like PinePhone and Purism Librem 5. Development of non-android, touch based, handheld Linux devices (mainly mobile phones and tablets) have seen rapid progress in the last couple of years.
0 kommentar(er)
