We all know by now that there’s a lot of Ubuntu Phone convergence work in progress happening as we speak, and with each new OTA update, Canonical’s mobile devices are turning into full-fledged and usable desktops.
We spotted earlier today a new image on the Google+ profile of Marius Quabeck, who managed to capture a nice photo of his converged Ubuntu Phone device connected to an LCD and running the latest Unity 8 user interface with X11 apps on top of the Mir display server.
The photo is attached at the end of the article, and it clearly shows the progress of the Unity 8 environment, which besides the fact that it looks pretty sleek when compared to the current Unity 7 user interface used on the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, it is also capable of running a bunch of GTK+ applications.
New convergence video coming soon
We can’t help but notice that the GTK+ theming is still not supported on the latest Unity 8/Mir combination, but at least you can run almost any X11 app. The photo shows some of the most popular open-source apps, such as the Chromium web browser, VLC Media Player, Pidgin IM client, GIMP image editor, and Gedit text editor.
It looks like Marius Quabeck was pretty impressed by the progress Canonical made with the Unity 8 environment on Ubuntu Phones, and he promised us that he might post a new convergence video soon, which will give us a more insightful look at the Unity 8 progress, like how fast or smooth the apps are.
Ubuntu Phones have just received the OTA-9 software update, and it brought some interesting features, as well as more convergence fixes, but in approximately one week from today Canonical will release the OTA-9.5 hotfix with major Unity 8 and Mir updates. We’ll update the article when the convergence video gets out!
Update: We’ve updated the article with some more photos (see below), as Marius Quabeck was kind enough to send us a few more to see his entire setup, which we have to admit that it looks amazing. Now we’re waiting for that convergence video!
Via Softpedia