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Michael Hall: Phones and Desktops converge at Ubuntu Online Summit Published Nov 3 2015 via RSS

planetUbuntu

With the release of the Wily Werewolf (Ubuntu 15.10) we have entered into the Xenial Xerus (to be Ubuntu 16.04) development cycle. This will be another big milestone for Ubuntu, not just because it will be another LTS, but it will be the last LTS before we acheive convergence. What we do here will not only be supported for the next 5 years, it will set the stage for everything to come over that time as we bring the desktop, phone and internet-of-things together into a single comprehensive, cohesive platform.

To help get us there, we have a track dedicated to Convergence at this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit where we will be discussing plans for desktops, phones, IoT and how they are going to come together.

Tuesday

We’ll start the the convergence track at 1600 with the Ubuntu Desktop team talking about the QA (Quality Assurance) plans for the next LTS desktop, which will provide another 5 years of support for Ubuntu users. We’ll end the day with the Kubuntu team who are planning for their 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) release at 1900 UTC.

Wednesday

The second day kicks off at 1400 UTC with plans for what version of the Qt toolkit will ship in 16.04, something that now affects both the KDE and Unity 8 flavors of Ubuntu. That will be followed by development planning for the next Unity 7 desktop version of Ubuntu at 1500, and a talk on how legacy apps (.deb and X11 based) might be supported in the new Snappy versions of Ubuntu. We will end the day with a presentation by the Unity 8 developers at 1800 about how you can get started working on and contributing to the next generation desktop interface for Ubuntu.

Thursday

The third and last day of the Online Summit will begin with a live Questions and Answers session at 1400 UTC about the Convergence plans in general with the project and engineering managers who are driving it forward. At 1500 we’ll take a look at how those plans are being realized in some of the apps already being developed for use on Ubuntu phones and desktop. Then at 1600 UTC members of the design team will be talking to independent app developers about how to design their app with convergence in mind. We will then end the convergence track with a summary from KDE developers on the state and direction of their converged UI, Plama Mobile.

Plenaries

Outside of the Convergence track, you’ll want to watch Mark Shuttleworth’s opening keynote at 1400 UTC on Tuesday, and Canonical CEO Jane Silber’s live Q&A session at 1700 UTC on Wednesday.