Ubuntu Touch: The Other Linux OS For Your Phone 53
An anonymous reader writes "Ars takes a look at what Ubuntu Touch has to offer so far. From the article: 'It can't be stressed enough that even in this updated form, Ubuntu Touch is nowhere near usable as a mainstream mobile operating system. Canonical makes no claim that it is. For now, the software is about half development environment and half proof-of-concept tech demo. As such, we aren't going to be evaluating Ubuntu Touch using quite the same criteria we'd use for a shipping product—we're going to be focusing more on how the OS looks and works and less on how it performs. As we get closer to Ubuntu 14.04 and presumably Ubuntu Touch's retail availability, we'll certainly be revisiting it with a more critical eye.'"
Re:I love the idea, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Even in Linux for desktops or servers if well there are several distributions there is no big effect of fragmentation, most programs run unchanged in all of them. You can run KDE apps in gnome desktops (provided that you have installed the libraries, and that the app is not specific for the desktop environment, like being a plasma extension), the difference between distributions (package formats? location of files? names of daemons?) is usually easy to fix or consider in your code, and as most is open source programs can be recompiled if is for another architecture.
If everything will be native linux, based on open libraries, probably won't be so hard to put a translation layer that makes easy to run the apps for one mobile OS into another (i.e. like Preenv for maemo [maemo.org]). And apps probably will be HTML5 (that most should run in all platforms, no matter if is linux or not, have Firefox OS apps running in my N9 with Hydra WRT [blogspot.com]), or in QT/QML (that maybe could be able to run with minimal changes, or not too hard to port, in other QT/QML platforms, be BB10, Sailfish, Meego, desktop or even android, besides Ubuntu Touch).