A week ago, the developers of the Ubports Foundation, under whose umbrella Ubuntu Touch is being developed, called for testing the latest version OTA-18. Now the 18th version of the distribution for smartphones and tablets has been released in a stable , as the announcement manner can be seen in .
Up to 6 years old
Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 will be to in the coming week around 30 supported devices , spanning delivered a period from the six-year-old BQ Aquaris E4.5 and E5 to current devices such as the Volla Phone and the F (x) tec Pro1 . Not on the list are the PinePhone and PineTab, which receive updates for Ubuntu Touch independently.
Memory relief
Older devices in particular benefit from a change that reduces the RAM requirements of Lomiri (formerly Ubuntu Unity). The Ubuntu Touch System UI has learned to scale down background images at runtime without affecting system performance. With the supported devices, the amount of memory saved depends on the screen resolution and the resolution of the background image of the respective device. However, 30 – 60 MB can be saved when rendering the wallpaper, which is significant for devices with only one GB of RAM.
The Media Hub system service, which is responsible for playing audio and video content in the background, has been rewritten. This makes the service easier to maintain and easier to expand in the future. The developers are thinking of functions such as picture-in-picture playback, which is so popular today.
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Small improvements
Further improvements are the automatic opening of the on-screen keyboard in new tabs in the standard Morph browser and a navigation history that can be scrolled through with the arrow keys on the keyboard. The terminal app can be accessed via the keyboard with the Strg+ALT+Tbe opened. In addition, the keyboard was expanded to include a degree symbol (°).
In the background, the developers are still working on porting Ubuntu Touch from the current code base Ubuntu 16.04 to the more contemporary Ubuntu 20.04. However, it is not known when the work will be completed. Further technical details of OTA-18 can be found in the changelog .
