Innovation in the Linux environment

Canonical and Convergence

The developers at Red Hat are not alone in taking initiative for setting the direction of the future development for Linux. Canonical is also heavily involved in defining the evolution of Linux. However, most Ubuntu users would agree that innovation has been pretty much missing for the last couple of years. Ubuntu on the desktop has been singularly boring.

This is probably because Canonical has been leaving no stone unturned to deliver genuine convergence in the form of a single foundation of source code for multiple platforms. This approach is different from that taken, for example, by Microsoft Continuum [24]. Canonical's approach is to set a smartphone or a tablet in a docking station and attach a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Then, voilà, you have an actual desktop. Thus, it will no longer be necessary to use smartphone or tablet apps. Instead, you would use the applications on the Ubuntu desktop (Figure 9).

Figure 9: If the Canonical developers are successful in implementing their ideas, then laptops and desktop PCs will become a dying breed.

With this vision in mind, Canonical conceived the Snappy package format, which it derived from the click packages of Ubuntu Touch. It is worth noting here that Canonical is probably very optimistic with respect to overcoming outstanding issues. As part of their efforts, the developers created their own display manager, Mir. In combination with Unity 8, this display manager forms the basis of the new platform.

Considering the scope of the modifications, confidence in the future success of the endeavor has been waning. The recently released Ubuntu tablet BQ Aquaris M10 is the first device for the actual use of products based on convergence.

Snappy Core

The Snappy package format borrowed heavily from the concepts underlying CoreOS [25] and Red Hat's Atomic Host [26] (Figure 10) and is also used in the Ubuntu Snappy Core. The latter is a lightweight operating system based on the Ubuntu kernel and is intended for gateways, routers, and equipment for the Internet of Things (IoT). It offers atomic upgrades with rollback functionality, making it possible for routers with Snappy Core to continuously receive updated firmware.

Figure 10: Red Hat Atomic offers atomic updates with rollback functionality.

At the end of February 2016, Canonical announced it had formed a partnership with the Taiwanese manufacturer MediaTek, who want to use Ubuntu Core on the MT7623 router for the SmartHome [27]. This system on chip (SoC) device offers numerous possibilities for wireless networking and is therefore suitable for use as a control center for the growing number of IoT devices.

Although Canonical is a relatively small company, OpenStack gives it a foot in the door to the cloud computing world. This is how the new format LXD [28] originated as the basis of Linux Containers (LXC). The format is a hybrid composed of a container engine and hypervisor, bringing the best of both worlds together without the overhead of the typical hypervisor.

Mark Shuttleworth has given the name Hypertainer to this new format. There are a number of realistic scenarios that point to its use on the desktop. Intel is heading in the same direction with the Clear Linux operating system, which is designated for use in the cloud. You can read more about Clear Linux elsewhere in this issue.