The new version of Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 has already been released

UBports has just announced the availability of a new version, which is Free Touch OTA-8 for all Ubuntu Touch compatible phone devices.

Community UBports, is the one that continues to maintain Ubuntu Touch for a variety of mobile devices. For those who were left with the idea that Ubuntu Touch had been abandoned for good, it really wasn't.

After the abandonment of Ubuntu Touch development by Canonical, The UBports team led by Marius Gripsgard was the one who took back the reins to continue with the project.

Ubports is basically a foundation whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Ubuntu Touch and promote widespread use. from Ubuntu Touch. The foundation provides legal, financial and organizational support to the entire community.

It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding, and other resources, with the knowledge that their contributions will be kept for the public benefit.

About the new OTA-8

As was said at the beginning of the article, We already have among us the firmware update OTA-8 for all compatible smartphones and tablets officially they were equipped with Ubuntu firmware.

The update is generated for smartphones OnePlus One, Fairphone 2, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2013, Meizu MX4 / PRO-5, Bq Aquaris E5 / E4.5 / M10. The project is also developing an experimental Unity 8 desktop port, available in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 versions.

This new release is based on Ubuntu 16.04 (the OTA-3 build was based on Ubuntu 15.04 and from OTA-4, the transition to Ubuntu 16.04 was made).

Main novelties of OTA-8

With the arrival of this new release of OTA-8 we can find that the main changes mainly affected the Morph Browser web browser, based on the current Chromium codebase.

The new version introduces support for a dark browser theme. The dark theme is enabled through the UT Tweak Tool and is also available in applications such as Weather, FluffyChat, and TELEports.

The Navigator also improved the display of pages with errors, as well as the correct display of the favicons in the list of favorite pages and added the ability to embed your own drivers in JavaScript.

The project infrastructure implemented automatic package testing using a continuous integration system.

Fixed issues in the UITK Toolkit (Ubuntu UI Toolkit). Updated location metadata for QtLocale.

Initially this new version of Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 the developers planned to migrate to Mir 1.1 and the latest version of Unity 8, but that was postponed due to stability issues.

To test the version with Mir 1.1 and the new Unity 8, a separate experimental branch was prepared.

The transition to the new Unity 8 will lead to the end of support for smart areas (Scope) and the integration of the new application launcher interface of applications.

In the future, full compatibility of the Anbox environment is also expected to launch Android applications.

Finally, of the other characteristics we can mention:

• Added support for ARM64 (AArch64). This would allow developers to bring Ubuntu Touch to more devices.
• Added improvements to the tethering by USB.
• Various corrections to problems that were in the agenda app.

How to get this new OTA-5?

Ubuntu Phone users using version OTA-7 can now update their devices to OTA-8 update Through the update option found in "System Settings> Updates".

After installation, your Ubuntu Touch device will automatically reboot for the OTA-8 update to install properly.

Si you want to know if your computer has compatibility to install Ubuntu Touch In it, I recommend you go to the official Ubports website and in its devices section you can see those that are officially supported.

As well as some others that are maintained and updated by third parties. The link is this.