A decades-old bug on Ubuntu’s Launchpad marked as invalid at the weekend led to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonical’s former engineers.
Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who’d spent £700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation to tell him how to use them.
Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug unresolved.
Until now.
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, on the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked the bug invalid this weekend, closing it with a comment to explain (nearly a decade late) that phone “efforts were spun off to Ubports eons ago”.
But in commenting on the closure, anyone subscribed to the bug (or who opted in to bugs about specific parts of Ubuntu), as former engineers had been at the time, was duly emailed to tell them about the status change.
That set a nostalgia train in accidental motion.
“Amazing nostalgia” – ex engineers reminisce
“What is this, an ex warthogs reunion?”, replied Chris Wayne, who worked in the Phone Delivery Team and was tech lead for Ubuntu Phone’s ‘scopes’, after receiving the update.
Marcus Tomlinson had helped build the Scopes framework but, in stepping aboard the reunion shuttle, made an unexpected confession: “I still don’t really know what a ‘Scope’ is… and I wrote it” – you and the rest of the world, eh Marcus?
For those unfamiliar, Ubuntu Phone’s Home Screen was made up of ‘scopes’ which, ostensibly, replaced the need for apps: rather than open Instagram or eBay, you access their content in a Scope1.
Zoltan B. chipped in (with what I’m choosing to read as a trace memory of this blog) to say: “Ohh my god :) I left Canonical when they sacked the whole Ubuntu Phone team :D I have really good memories about that project.”
Matt Fischer, who worked at Canonical from the early 2010s, described the impromptu reunion as “amazing nostalgia”, noting the phone/tablet was the last one he worked on while at the company. “Every so often someone closes an old bug I filed”, he added.
The warm comments have continued, checking off the usual pleasantries. “Good times”, “I hope you are all doing well!” and so on. If the reunion continues into the small hours, hopefully, like my last school one, someone gets wasted and brings the tea.
Ubuntu Phone wasn’t for nothing
Canonical laid off the majority of its phone team in 2017 (among many other staff) after Mark Shuttleworth conceded things hadn’t worked out. The company had invested huge amount of moneys into the effort, come up short, so pivoted back to its core successes.
Ubuntu Phone wasn’t a wasted effort. Snap was born from Ubuntu Phone’s Click format; Mir was repurposed into a Wayland compositor that’s now in use in industrial and embedded environments; and the Ubuntu desktop was revived with the switch to GNOME.
Ubports took over Ubuntu phone and has maintained it since, even shipping it on new, albeit niche, handsets from Pine64 and Volla. The most recent update was in July.
Despite the warm memories of those involved, it’s an archive comment from the original bug reporter in 2016, that reminds us why Ubuntu Phone is a footnote in the distro’s history, rather than a ongoing feature:
“I have paid over £700 of real money to buy Ubuntu branded hardware, the phone and tablet [and] not only is it half finished but no-one bothered to write any user documentation at all? I think that is rather contemptuous”, he wrote at the time.
Ubuntu Phone wasn’t a hit with the wider world, but based on the belated warmth emanating from this particular bug thread, it clearly meant something to the people who helped make it.
- “So a widget?”, and yeah, kinda! Albeit more uniform, full-height, standardised. Rather than make an app for Ubuntu the idea was ISVs could just plug their API into a scope instead, and have that do (more or less) the same thing. ↩︎