I love the idea - but it's really not what Canonical was attempting, except in the most general sense.
Even if you completely ignore the entire open hardware aspect, and just focus on the OS, they're still doing something very different. From the look of it Librem OS has two different interfaces - a typical touchscreen phone interface, and a typical mouse driven desktop interface, and switches between them based on context. (well, more of a Ubuntu's-downfall style desktop, which I'm not a fan of, but still, not a phone OS)
Canonical on the other hand took a mature and polished desktop distribution that was rapidly unifying the more casual "just works" Linux community, and completely threw away the interface to try to create one single, consistent user interface that would work equally well with two wildly different sets of I/O hardware. And as a result they created something poorly suited for either interface - which I strongly suspect was the only possible outcome.
It wasn't helped by the fact that their desktop was also terribly immature, and took years before it got anywhere close to feature parity with their original much-loved desktop. They generated a lot of user animosity and lost their position as a dominant desktop distribution, because they had a lousy desktop interface. And they never got a foothold as a touchscreen distribution, because they had a lousy touchscreen interface (and were competing directly against Android with it's huge existing base of users and software, but that's another conversation)
Not to mention that it happened in the same time frame as Microsoft was developing the Metro UI in a rather obvious attempt to force all Windows users to get used to their mobile os and app store.
Yeah, there was a big push for a while by a lot of the big players to develop a unified interface, which just seems stupid. I'm a big fan of hardware convergence, and it seems rather inevitable. Interface convergence though - I don't understand why anyone ever thought that was a good idea. If your hardware interfaces are wildly different, the software interfaces needs to be similarly different to leverage the respective strengths of the hardware. Otherwise you just get something that sucks for everythin
"Just think of a computer as hardware you can program."
-- Nigel de la Tierre
Not a bad idea (Score:1)
This is what Canonical was trying to do years ago and everyone piled shit on them for it and in some cases, actively sabotaged their attempts.
Re:Not a bad idea (Score:3)
I love the idea - but it's really not what Canonical was attempting, except in the most general sense.
Even if you completely ignore the entire open hardware aspect, and just focus on the OS, they're still doing something very different.
From the look of it Librem OS has two different interfaces - a typical touchscreen phone interface, and a typical mouse driven desktop interface, and switches between them based on context. (well, more of a Ubuntu's-downfall style desktop, which I'm not a fan of, but still, not a phone OS)
Canonical on the other hand took a mature and polished desktop distribution that was rapidly unifying the more casual "just works" Linux community, and completely threw away the interface to try to create one single, consistent user interface that would work equally well with two wildly different sets of I/O hardware. And as a result they created something poorly suited for either interface - which I strongly suspect was the only possible outcome.
It wasn't helped by the fact that their desktop was also terribly immature, and took years before it got anywhere close to feature parity with their original much-loved desktop. They generated a lot of user animosity and lost their position as a dominant desktop distribution, because they had a lousy desktop interface. And they never got a foothold as a touchscreen distribution, because they had a lousy touchscreen interface (and were competing directly against Android with it's huge existing base of users and software, but that's another conversation)
Re: (Score:1)
Not to mention that it happened in the same time frame as Microsoft was developing the Metro UI in a rather obvious attempt to force all Windows users to get used to their mobile os and app store.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, there was a big push for a while by a lot of the big players to develop a unified interface, which just seems stupid. I'm a big fan of hardware convergence, and it seems rather inevitable. Interface convergence though - I don't understand why anyone ever thought that was a good idea. If your hardware interfaces are wildly different, the software interfaces needs to be similarly different to leverage the respective strengths of the hardware. Otherwise you just get something that sucks for everythin