In an effort to keep the Ubuntu Touch community still alive the development team in charge of thisubports) has recently announced that the next OTA-8 version of Ubuntu Touch will be arriving next week.
In addition to this in the statement given by UBports They have leaked some of the news they have prepared for this new release. Among which we can highlight that the migration to Mir 1.1 as well as the Unity 8 environment will not arrive in that version.
About UBports
The UBports community is the one that continues to maintain Ubuntu Touch for a variety of mobile devices. For those who were left with the idea that Ubuntu Touch had been abandoned for good, it really was not.
After the abandonment of Ubuntu Touch development by Canonical, the UBports team led by Marius Gripsgard was the one who took over the reins to continue with the project.
Ubports is basically a foundation whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Ubuntu Touch and promote the widespread use of Ubuntu Touch. The foundation provides legal, financial and organizational support to the entire community.
It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding, and other resources, with the knowledge that their contributions will be kept for the public benefit.
Neither Mir nor Unity 8
From previous versions of Ubuntu Touch it had been said that a migration to Mir 1.1 was going to be carried out and to version 8 of Unity, moves that will have to wait.
Argues the UBports development team:
Its main blocker to implement the new Unity and Mir is based on Qualcomm binary graphics drivers causing problems with graphical issues and application statistics issues. It would be easier if it was open source.
There is no word though if Freedreno + MSM have recently been evaluated for the viability of that open source Qualcomm than unofficial graphics.
A small sacrifice to increase stability
But not everything is bad and nothing is lost, with the announcement of this next release as well The promise emerges is of several enhancements to make the Ubuntu Touch experience more reliable.
This new Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update comes a month and a half after the Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 release.
However, before the official release The UBports community needs the help of those enthusiasts who want to test the pre-release builds.
The goal is to report any issues you may encounter to ensure the quality of the final version for everyone.
To be able to access this trial version, you only have to go on your device with Ubuntu Touch to "System Configuration -> Updates -> Update Configuration -> Release channel"
Here they are going to select rc. They should then return to the updates screen to install the downloaded update.
What's New in Ubuntu Touch OTA-8?
In this new release The developers have focused again on the Morph browser which will come with support for the favicons as well as adding a new themed error page (when page load fails).
On the other hand, we can also mention that Added custom user scripts to the browser and increased loading of the Web Applications home page.
The Ubuntu Touch ota-8 update also brings improvements for other components and applications, including:
- The Contacts app, which received improved contact search and new colored buttons in the dialogs to match the design guidelines.
- Welcome from the wizard, which now automatically focuses on the first text field on each page.
- Additionally, Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 removes the Oxide Web-based Library mechanisms.
- Improves Unity 8 testing to allow support for ARM64
- Improve testing in Ubuntu Toolkit UI (UITK)
- Small improvements to the message app and USB tethering.
Last but not least, Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 seeks to change the pre-boot script (pre-start.sh) to Android halium-boot.