 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to be talking about Ubuntu Web. It's going to be like a little bit of a first look, not really a review because this is a remix, it's still in beta, and I don't want to be too hard on it. Now if this is two days ago, so I wrote a script for this video and the script was not kind to Ubuntu Web. My first experiences just were not good, but I had a chance to think about it for a few days and I listened to the Ubuntu podcast and they really liked the developer behind Ubuntu Web. I'm not sure what it can't remember what his name was, it doesn't even really matter, and I had a chance to go through some of the comments on the the discourse where this was announced. And I decided to scrap the script that I originally wrote, but some of my points are still going to be relevant. So I'm going to use it a little bit as an outline, but this is mostly going to be kind of a rambly type video, not that all my videos aren't like rambly, and for those of you who are returning viewers, if there are any of those, you can tell I've done a little bit of sprucing up at the beginning here. I put my face on the opening card here and I've still had to figure out how to put my video in the corner like normal people do. But anyways, let's just jump into Ubuntu Web. This is what Ubuntu Web looks like out of the box. So first, let's just discuss what Ubuntu Web is. Basically, Ubuntu Web is described as a privacy-focused open source alternative to Google's Chrome OS. It uses Firefox instead of Chromium to run web apps in containers. It uses a partnership with a cloud services company called E slash E or the E Foundation or something like that to provide several cloud-based services that are placed right up front. It also promises experimental Android app support, which I didn't get a chance to use or figure out, so I won't be talking about that today. So the idea behind Ubuntu Web is really good. You have a desktop environment that is based on web technologies like Chrome that is based on a kernel of Linux that is surrounded by a wrapper of Chrome where pretty much everything on there is Chrome based. That's what Chrome OS is. So theoretically, that's what Ubuntu Web should be only using Firefox. But as you can see, if you look at this, this is this is GNOME. This is GNOME. And it's not even good GNOME. But it's fine. It looks fine. It's reasonably well themed. But the main draw here is supposed to be the quote unquote web apps that are containerized Firefox things that allow you to get into certain applications that are mainly on the web. So like email. Now you click on this, what do you think it's going to bring up? You would think it'd bring up, oh, it probably is not going to bring up Gmail. I mean, that'd be dumb. But it'd bring up some kind of online email service that's easily to get to. You click on this. And you get a Firefox with a tab. And then you get a login password and thing for something called eCloud, eCloud.global. No exclamation as to what that is. When I first used this, I was like, what the hell is eCloud? I still don't know what eCloud is. I had to look it up. And you can actually, this is actually the first time I've noticed this, this actually does have a link to the foundation. So basically what the foundation is, is an open source mobile phone operating system. Basically, that's what the foundation is. Now that looks exactly like an iPhone or iOS, I guess. So clone time, but whatever. I'm not sure what a mobile operating system has to do with this. But if you click on your email here, it opens up email. It highlights Firefox. And it takes you to this. That's all it is. Now, every email is going to require you to sign in. That's not a big deal. But look at this file, this files thing. You click on files, it brings you to Firefox, and you have to sign in to do it. What? And now I understand that the files they're talking about are something is presumably something like pCloud or Google Drive or something like that. That's great. But a new user is going to think that this is their file browser, because that's what's pinned at on the taskbar. That is confusing. Now there is local file thing. This looks like, this looks like Nautilus. Yeah, this is Nautilus. Okay. But it's not pinned down here. This eFoundation files thing of a jig is pinned down here, and you can't get into it without signing in again, which, again, is fine if you understand what you're getting into. But again, this is what they put front and center in front of your face, and that's what you get. Now, there are a couple of things here. This is called Dtube. I have no idea what that is. It appears to be some kind of clone of Ubuntu, but I've never heard of it before. I mean, I've never heard of it before. Like, I don't know if there's anybody. Let's see if there's a distro. No. I mean, what the hell is Dtube? I've never heard of Dtube before. Where did they come up with this? Why isn't this library? Why isn't this peer tube or something that would make way more sense than some random strange shady website that I've never heard of? And this is supposedly their web store. This was not working yesterday. This was actually down. But I still don't see, you know, literally they have one app in education, one app in music. I mean, you gotta remember, that's fine because this is just beta software. I'm not criticizing the lack of applications, but these are just, and you would expect these just to be web extensions or whatever, which is fine. This is what it's meant to be, what it's meant to do. It's just, this is the, honestly, this is the, of the five things here other than Firefox, this is the only one that actually makes sense to have pinned down here. The other ones are things that you have to sign into. And that's just not a good thing to present front and center to users, especially when you're linking to something that is really weird. Nobody knows what the foundation is. Nobody's ever really heard of it, especially new users. So if the winter web is going to be successful, this has got changed. So I kind of got right into the rant. And I didn't want, I wanted to be generous to this, this distro. But I'm just, I'm at a loss as to why this exists if it's going to be just GNOME. Okay, so Chrome OS isn't just Linux with Chromium installed. It's not just a Android with Chromium installed. It's actually, when you log in, you're logging into a version of Chrome that looks like an operating system. That would be cool if this was what this is, was a Firefox OS kind of thing. But that's not what this is. This is GNOME, with all the things that GNOME brings to the table, all the overhead, everything like that, with some really weird pre-installed web applications that come from a service that nobody really knows about, and that nobody really uses. And it wouldn't be so bad if there was an explanation. There's not an explanation, at least so far there's not an explanation. There's just, you know, links to these things. And these things aren't even really apps, like you can tell they're not really apps, because when you open them, Firefox stays highlighted and these don't get highlighted or anything. It's really weird. It's really, really weird. So that's really my thought on the way they've implemented this. I have a whole bunch of stuff here written down. So I guess the answer, so the question I asked in my script was, is Ubuntu Web any good? And the answer I came up with, no Ubuntu Web isn't any good. But I said there's some arguments that could be made that the Ubuntu Web is a beta project, and it's not complete in yada, yada, yada. And I'm more warming to that aspect of this now than I was when I first wrote my script. Mainly because of what the Ubuntu podcast guy says, guys said in terms of, you know, this actually being a reputable developer, everything. When I first got out of this, I had no clue who it was. And I just heard about Ubuntu Web on the internet. And I clicked on, you know, one of these icons, and it came up to come up with this. I mean, this is, this is insane. I mean, this is, even Google doesn't make you sign into your files app. Because I was like, what the hell? Why am I signing into a file app? All I want to do is browse the files. Why isn't this, you know, on the, the, you know, the, the taskbar doesn't make any sense. And it is now. Again, that's good, right? That's, that's, this is the way it should be this your local whatever's local should be on here if you're if you're going to bother to have local things, which they are, because this is GNOME. I'm just not on board with what Ubuntu Web at the moment is trying to do because it doesn't seem to have a purpose. Chrome OS has a purpose in that it's supposed to be a lightweight web based operating system. Yes, it's based on Linux, but the Linux kernel, it's, it's based on Linux the same way Android is based on Linux. It has a whole bunch of stuff that's running on top of it to make it what it is, you know, Java and, you know, whatever. This is just GNOME with some really weird web apps. And there's nothing wrong with GNOME. It's just, we've got that already. You know, why are you wasting your time developing this? Because we got this. We have GNOME already. It's okay to make a, you know, fine, make a remix, but don't try to sell it as something that's, you know, awesome and different. This is just GNOME with the Firefox web browser. These aren't specific. The, the discord, the, the developer in there on the discourse posts made a big deal about how these are containerized wrappers for Firefox and no, they're not. No, they're not. This isn't a containerized version of Firefox. This is just Firefox opening tabs. That's all this is. These aren't specific dedicated apps that are like, you know, electron apps, but, you know, running on a Firefox background. These are just links to weird things in Firefox tabs. That's what that is. And that's, that's really, really weird. And it's really, it just, it's very unusual and very mind boggling that a developer who seems to, you know, have other projects, he does the, I think he does the Unity remix too. And like, that's a, that's a legitimate remix. People want Unity. And I think that there are people out there who would love an OS based on Ubuntu that is running a brand new, you know, desktop environment that's based on web technologies. And that'd be cool. That's not what this is. This is, this is, this is Ubuntu with a couple extensions installed so that you can move the doc down here and, you know, a few custom icons and Firefox. That's all this is. This is a complete waste of time. And like I said, the argument could be made that it's beta and maybe the developer's vision hasn't been, you know, been realized yet. But I would just stop. I would just stop because there's nothing here that you need. I mean, the anbox thing is cool. I haven't had a chance to play with that. So maybe that's the cool thing. But again, you go into the notes thing. Again, you have to sign in. And that's not unusual for notes thing. I'm doing a notes video. I think it comes out tomorrow. And most notes apps, if you want to sync things, or you're using them online, you have to sign in. So that's not unusual. It's just that none of these things that are the things that he's drawing you into can be accessed without signing in. And when FOS when free and open source software is involved, one of the primary reasons why you would get involved with such software is because of privacy. And the fact that you have to sign into every single thing, photos, notes, files, email, contacts, calendar, tasks, I'm going to be surprised if anbox am I going to open that up? You just have to sign into those things. And you can't just use, I mean, I understand why it's just that every single thing you have to do that. If when you signed up for your when you created a new user on this, it also created that account for you to get into those things that'd be good, you know, theoretically, I suppose it could be good. But there's no local you don't own any of these things, you don't have any control over it. And there's as of right now, there's no explanation as to who is really behind these things. There's the foundation. But like I said, new users aren't going to know what that is. I had to go look it up. I'd never heard of them before. The only two apps that you can use on here without signing in that aren't local are SoundCloud. And that works just like SoundCloud does. And of course, Twitter. So and again, these aren't containerized web apps, these are just links to Firefox. You know, it's not any special magic developer sauce that he's put into this. To make it more secure, more privacy focused, none of that. Like I said, they build this as a privacy focused web distribution. This is just Firefox in a tab with Twitter in it. It's not anything special. It's not anything you can do on regular Ubuntu. You can you can pin, you know, Gmail or whatever to your, your, your, you know, taskbar, you know, with existing Firefox technologies, you can do it with Chrome, you can do it with Brave, you can do it with all the any of those things you can just create. There's also, I think there's something called like Fluxbox, maybe something like that. So that creates web apps based on Electron. That exists. This is just what this is. And it's not, it doesn't make any sense as to why it exists. So I was going to try to talk about some of the good things, but I'm not sure there are any good things. This is just, you know, I mean, it's fine, and it's pretty enough. But for me, it's completely pointless. As it sits right now, I may look at this in a year again, if it still exists. And, you know, maybe he's made some progress on it. So basically, I just followed my original script. Because my original script was just bitching about all these weird applications and no purpose to this. So a lot of my criticism still stand. But the Ubuntu podcast guys seem to really like this. And I'm not exactly sure why I would love to hear them explain. I'd love to see them try this and out of the box and tell us exactly what it is they like about this, because I'm not exactly sure. So my biggest question is why does Ubuntu web exists? It just, why does it exist? And Ubuntu spin that focuses on apps that are purely web based might be a good idea. And I think it probably is a good deal. I think that low end hardware like the Pinebook and different ARM based hardware, you know, things, you know, Raspberry Pi and stuff like that, those would all benefit from a very lightweight, low powered Linux kernel with a desktop environment that is purely basically Firefox. Good idea. That's not what this is. That's not what this is. This is GNOME with a few few extensions on top of it and some walking links to Firefox tabs. It's nothing else. I just don't think it should exist. I mean, I'm all Linux has a huge problem with fragmentation. There's I mean, the great thing about links is there's also choice. The worst thing about Linux is there's too much choice. So and the fact that this exists is just going to confuse people, because it's going to be built as Chrome OS and people are like, Oh, Chrome OS is pretty good. I'm going to try this. And then they're going to realize that this is nothing like Chrome OS. I mean, it looks a little bit like Chrome OS. It doesn't want to bother people that it's Chrome or that it's GNOME. It's more it's these things down here at the bottom that are going to bother people. And it's also going to be that I mean, we're going to watch a local video. What if you want to watch a local video? There's no VLC here. There's a screenshot application and a document scanning application, but there's no VLC or, you know, MPD or MPV or any of those things. It's very weird. Excuse me. Macedon online. Why does it have a Twitch logo? I don't understand. Macedon is like the Twitter clone, right? But why does it have a I get more confused every time I open this up. I'm just like, it's really weird. Anyways, what does Anbox look like? I'm just curious for this. I want to say Anbox because Anbox is literally the only thing that makes this any interesting for me at all anymore. I'm all for trying new things. I really do like new things. And despite my criticisms on too much choice, I think it is great that the developer can say, hey, you know, I want to do some cool things. I want to do something new and exciting. But it still feels like a waste of time to me. And this is Android applications that you can view. So that basically takes you to, I believe that's a Gmail app. I don't know. Is it Android settings? I mean, that's cool. I don't know what the purpose of it is though. And it crashed. I mean, that's beta. I mean, that's fine, whatever. Anyway, so that's just, that's a first look at Ubuntu Web. It's more like a first rant about Ubuntu Web. You know, developers are precious, right? The great thing about open source is that developers can pretty much work on whatever they want. And thank God for that, because without that freedom, we wouldn't have a lot of good open source software that we have now and can enjoy and take it for granted. And maybe in a year, two years, five years, whatever, Ubuntu Web is this amazing thing. And I'll look like a freaking moron for poo-pooing it. It's happened before. But as it sits right now, for me, what it looks like is just a complete waste of the developer's time. And if it's still something that he's interested in, I'm all for continuing, because everybody does something that's a waste of time. It can be just, you know, a hobby for him. Fine. I think it confuses, it's going to confuse a lot of people if it ever comes out and becomes in a, I just, the way it stands right now, I don't see this ever becoming an Ubuntu flavor. But if it does, it's going to confuse a lot of people. Oops. Anyways, so if you liked this non-sentence rant, you can give us a thumbs up. If you really liked it, you can give us a subscribe. If not, don't subscribe, obviously. We'll see you next time. And thanks you for watching.