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 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 everything.
I've got to wonder just how often we have to re-learn "jack of all trades, master of none".
I mean, there are occasioanlly brilliant polymaths that can master many trades, and maybe someone will eventually work out an all-purpose interface that works well for everything, but that's not the way to bet. Especially not when betting your business and good name on the attempt without even having a particularly promising concept.
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: (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,
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:Not a bad idea (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 everything.
I've got to wonder just how often we have to re-learn "jack of all trades, master of none".
I mean, there are occasioanlly brilliant polymaths that can master many trades, and maybe someone will eventually work out an all-purpose interface that works well for everything, but that's not the way to bet. Especially not when betting your business and good name on the attempt without even having a particularly promising concept.