I parted company with my (second) Ubuntu phone last year, after Canonical announced that that particular phone, or its predecessor, wouldn’t support true convergence. Yes, I could connect it to a keyboard and mouse and it would be transformed from a phone to a linux computer. Well, sort of. The desktop applications, so needed to avhieve a truly converged device, weren’t available. Phone development recently lost momentum and, while a tablet was released, the OS remained a niche product.

And now the nail in the convergence coffin. Yesterday, Canonical announced that it plans to drop its proprietry unity to return to gnome within the next two LTS releases. Since mobile devices are unity based, they clearly now have no future. 

In one respect, I do miss my ubuntu phone. The OS was a joy to use, extremely intuitive, using only thumb gestures. And it was pretty too. But we parted company because a year without even the most basic of applications was too much. Yes, there were some native apps (very few), but many were crude webapps which didn’t work very well. 

One good thing that came out of the experience was my discovery of meizu phones. My second ubuntu phone was a Meizu MX4 and it was great. My second in command has one, although it runs Android. I’m now using a Meizu M3, the mini variant, which isn’t mini at all. 

I’ll continue to run Ubuntu on desktop PCs, I couldn’t imagine using anything else. But it’s a shame that the mobile version no longer has a future. 

Still, there are a couple of other approaches aiming to establish Linux on mobile devices, so I’ll keep an eye on these. And, I guess, Android is Linux-based.