Will 2013 be the Year of the Linux Tablet? Personally, I’m not about to bet any cash on it just yet. But if Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has his way, Linux developers increasingly will be turning their attention to mobile, tablet and TV platforms over the coming year.
If you want to use Ubuntu Linux on your tablet, you’re in luck — if you happen to own a Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Nexus 7, at least. That device, which Canonical has targeted as a proving ground for Ubuntu on mobile devices, can now run the operating system.
Canonical has suffered more than a little flack over the years for what some critics call a lack of openness in Ubuntu development. But if one agrees with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, the truly closed platforms are Ubuntu’s competitors, especially Red Hat. At least, that’s what Shuttleworth had to say recently on his blog.
Published at LXer:
It's official: Microsoft's near-monopoly on personal computing is over. At least, so says Ubuntu founder (and space traveler) Mark Shuttleworth, who has declared Ubuntu's infamous Bug #1 -- titled "Microsoft has a majority market share" -- closed.
It’s that time of year again — mobile nerds and enthusiasts of all stripes have begun to descend upon Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, and naturally a TechCrunch contingent has set up camp in Spain to cover it all.
Or, we’ll try anyway.
The odds are stacked against Canonical’s late-comer Ubuntu phone OS. But by seducing hardcore mobile users who love to customize, it could box out Microsoft and pull lucrative customers away from Android and iOS. Tinkerers buy high-end devices, pay for apps, and attract premium advertisers.
To express myself mildly, I'm not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, they seem clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE's Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface I can tolerate on a workstation
The man behind Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, has scratched all the circulating rumours about Canonical working on an Ubuntu Tablet version. He said that Ubuntu is all about Servers, Desktops and Netbooks; there are no plans for bringing Ubuntu to a smartphone or Tablet as of now.
If there was ever any doubt as to Canonical's true intentions with its touch-enabled Unity interface, those doubts were laid to rest last week. Unity has often been described as a "mobile-inspired" interface, and voila! Canonical has finally admitted that it plans to bring Ubuntu onto mobile devices. At last, it all makes sense!
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