As many know, I have been the lead of Ubuntu Studio for more than 7 years. I’m the longest-tenured Ubuntu Studio lead. I owe much of the foundation that was built to my predecessors: Luke Yelavich (founder), Scott Lavender, Kaj Ailomaa, and Set Halstrom. It is a true labor of love for me, and is the foundation for much of what I do.

I have worked myself through the ranks of Ubuntu, becoming a small-time packager for a small set of Ubuntu packages, then the Ubuntu Studio packageset, moving up to MOTU (Master of the Universe). I also served on the Ubuntu Community Council and am a current Discourse moderator.

Community and the love of people is a huge motivation for me. Granted, for those first four years, I hadn’t ever met the people I was collaborating with to make Ubuntu Studio what it is.

Then in August 2022, I was invited to attend the first ever Ubuntu Summit 2022 in Prague, Czechia. Having never travelled abroad before and never having even been off the continent of North America, itself a challenge as getting a U.S. passport is neither cheap nor easy, I was reluctant at first. Then I managed to get my passport, as well as the funds and passports to bring my wife and son to Ubuntu Summit.

That experience changed my life and the life of my entire family. My son, 10 at the time, was the youngest registered attendee. My wife was inspired to bring back Edubuntu, which had been defunct for nine long years by the time it was revived that following spring.

These are the things that happen when you have personal connections with people. If you’ve never read the book before, I encourage you to read Hardwired to Connect, which is a research paper published by a bunch of scientists. In essence, it says that people’s brains are wired, from birth, to engage in communities in for personal, in-person connections. It’s a scientific study that took years and is an excellent introduction to why we are the way we are.

Much of my education revolves around the very idea of building personal communities, which is one reason I was appalled when Ubuntu Summit, starting with 25.10, while it would be twice a year, it would be online-only except for the speakers. Having spoken at the past three, I was planning to take a year off from speaking, while still being there to represent as an Ubuntu Flavor Lead with my wife, also a now Flavor Lead.

If it weren’t for that initial Ubuntu Summit, in person, my wife and son would not have been as interested or as involved as they are today. The subsequent years only strengthened that involvement.

Now, it’s going to be an online-focused approach. I get it. It’s cheaper and easier. Also, those attending online were just watching a livestream anyhow. The Local Communities (LoCos) can get together on their own if they want to do a big event. It’s easier to reach more people if you do everything online.

Except it’s not.

For instance, the nearest active LoCo to me, in the Seattle-Tacoma area, is the Southern California LoCo. Meetups with them are logistically impossible. Same if I were to go to the Arizona LoCo; it’s just not possible. Most of the states in the United States are huge, so if there were one LoCo per state, it wouldn’t be correct. To be honest, I have no desire, time, or energy left to start and lead a LoCo in my area. Besides that, there used to be one for my state, but it’s long gone.

Furthermore, with the exception of me and my wife, us flavor leads are scattered to the globe. It used to be that we would meet online throughout the year every other month and then meet together once a year at Ubuntu Summit. That’s gone now.

Again, I get it. Canonical is a company that is and always has been majority remote work. Except for one thing: they get together twice a year in-person, and are even given T-Shirts to celebrate the immediately-prior release which was partially built by volunteers. Those of us who give our time, energy, and effort to the Ubuntu community aren’t given that in-person experience, let alone a T-Shirt. The very lifeblood of what makes Ubuntu so great isn’t given the ability to meet in-person. That’s been stripped from us, and it came as a complete surprise.

I’m not without ideas for solutions to problems, though. Rather than be completely destructive in this post, I can be constructive. My solution to this would be a compromise:

• Have the Summit be in-person once a year following the yy.04 release
  • Have that one go back to being what it was. It can either have booths like 2024 did or go back to being talk/workshop-focused like years prior. It doesn’t matter, it just needs to be in-person.
• Have the Summit be online once a year following the yy.10 release

I don’t think this is too much to ask. The reward of personal connections when doing something remote for most of the year is a small price to pay, no matter the cost. Personal connections are tantamount to a healthy community.

I think my compromise would prevent the Summit from dying just like the Ubuntu Developer Summit did once it went online-only. The way I see it is with the current status-quo, history is repeating itself.

I’m sure people at Canonical don’t see it this way because they meet with the people they work with the most twice a year. Those of us from the Ubuntu community that are developers aren’t given that luxury. We’re not even given that luxury once a year now. We’re not even given a T-Shirt!

Am I angry? A little. Do I feel betrayed by the very community I have given so much to over the years? Absolutely. Either way, I believe an online-only Summit is anti-collaborative in that it removes personal connections from the equation, which goes against the very fiber of my being.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope this reaches the people I’m trying to reach and have it speak for those who either won’t speak-up or don’t think they can make a difference.

Recently, I became the proud owner of a Behringer X-Air XR18. This became the key to opening a new business, which I’ll announce at a later date. I’m working on acquiring more equipment to make this work.

As many people know, the XR18 is a stagebox-style mixer in which the mixer is physically on the stage with no controls but controlled with an iPad or Android tablet. However, as the owner of a Behringer X-Touch, which integrates seamlessly with an X-Air mixer via either MIDI or Network connections. In my situation, this gives the ability to have a physical front-of-house setup, with a computer showing the X-Air Edit application.

However, what if I want to multi-track record or add custom effects via Ubuntu Studio? This is where it would get complicated as I would then have to run a prohibitively-long USB cable from my computer to the XR18 on the stage. This would not be ideal.

As many people know, MIDI can be routed via network, which is the way the X-Touch, XR18, and X-Air app work together. A simple WiFi router and ethernet cable wouild be a great solution to this problem, but that also leaves an Ethernet cable prone to being tripped-over by audience members (unless one were to gaff it down). So, since we’ve already got WiFi, let’s take advantage of that.

To expose the audio ports to the WiFi, we’re going to have to bridge it. But… how? Most people would tell me just to use Dante but, unfortunately, Audinate refuses to support Linux, and AES67 support in PipeWire is very young. However, it turns out, JackTrip is in the Ubuntu repositories and, as its name would imply, integrates seamlessly with JACK and, therefore, PipeWire.

Setting this up is rather simple, and I’m documenting the process here.

Prerequisites

• A Raspberry Pi 4 or higher (I have a late 2023 Raspberry Pi 5)
• A micro SD card (16GB or larger)
• Ubuntu Server for Raspberry Pi (I used 24.04, linked here).
• Optional: Ubuntu Pro (for the RealTime Ubuntu Raspberry Pi Kernel)

Here we go…

The first thing I did was install the downloaded preinstalled server image to a micro SD card. This is accomplished using Raspberry Pi Imager. I used the Snap version maintained by Dave Jones of Canonical, part of Canonical’s Raspberry Pi team. If you’ve never met Dave, he does all of his computing via Raspberry Pi, and it’s a sight to behold!

To get that, it’s as easy as sudo snap install rpi-imager.

I made sure to set the server to automatically detect my WiFi, but if you plan to use a hard Ethernet connection, this isn’t necessary. Just be sure you can SSH into the machine as this is key (pre-set a user and set the machine name).

Once the SD card is imaged, I SSH’d into the machine (ssh erich@{computer-name}.local). The first thing I did was install jackd2 and jacktrip:

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends jackd2 jacktrip

One must use the --no-install-recommends option to avoid installing unecessary graphical tools as jackd2 will want to install qjackctl which is the GUI application to control JACK. We don’t need it here. JackTrip has an option to automatically connect to all inputs and outputs, so we’ll use that here.

To automatically start JACK upon boot, I modified this systemd unit file to be custom for my setup. You’ll notice I made the buffer 256 (-p 256) with 3 periods per buffer (-n 3) as gives the highest reliablility on a USB connection. Additionally, the highest frequency an XR18 runs at is 48000 Hz, so I made sure to set the frequency there (-r 48000). Also, we want the process to run in realtime and directly to ALSA (--realtime -dalsa):

[Unit]
Description=JACK server using %i user profile
Documentation=man:jackd(1)
After=sound.target local-fs.target

[Service]
User=%i
Group=%i
#Type=notify
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/jack/alsa.conf
#EnvironmentFile=-%h/.config/jack/%i.conf
ExecStart=/usr/bin/jackd --realtime -dalsa -p 256 -n 3 -r 48000
# -d $DEVICE $DRIVER_SETTINGS
LimitRTPRIO=95
LimitRTTIME=infinity
LimitMEMLOCK=infinity
# Caution: use on memory-limited devices only
# OOMScoreAdjust=-1000

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I installed this to /usr/lib/systemd/system/[email protected].

Next, I created a systemd unit file to start JackTrip. I needed this to be a server (-s), with 18 inputs and outputs (for an XR18, -n 18) and automatically connect upon start (-q auto):

[Unit]
Description=JackTrip Audio Network Service
After=network.target sound.target jackd@%i.service
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
# Run as a specific user who has JACK permissions
User=%i
Group=%i

ExecStart=jacktrip -s -n 18 -q auto --udprt
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

# Optional: environment for JACK if needed
#Environment=JACK_NO_AUDIO_RESERVATION=1

# Give JACK/JackTrip real-time priority
LimitRTPRIO=infinity
LimitMEMLOCK=infinity

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I installed this to /usr/lib/systemd/system/[email protected].

Next, to make sure this runs as my user, I did the following:

sudo systemctl enable [email protected]
sudo systemctl enable [email protected]

Optionally, since this will be used as a headless appliance, one can use Ubuntu Pro to get the RealTime Kernel. This is accomplished by the following with an Ubuntu One account:

pro attach
pro enable realtime-kernel

To make sure everything worked, check pro status.

You can have up to 5 machines running Ubuntu Pro for free. In my case, as an Ubuntu Member, I can have up to 50 machines for free, and this is only my third one!

Once this is done, reboot. On your other machine, install jacktrip-gui. (This will be in Ubuntu Studio 25.10 and higher by default!): sudo apt install jacktrip-gui.

Opening it, it will ask you if you want to sign in with a Virtual Studio account. This is because JackTrip allows you to collaborate across the entire internet with fellow musicians with very low latency! It’s pretty cool! However, we don’t need that for this purpose. Instead, we’re going to say “No” and simply connect to the server as a P2P client:

Enter the computer name with .local afterwards, and it should find it as long as your desktop or laptop is connected to the same network as the Raspberry Pi.

After you click “Connect”, you should see this:

As you can see, this has audio coming in from a microphone already.

Back in X-Air Edit, already connected to the mixer, I changed my routing so channels 1 and 2 were being sent to the aux, so I can then use my computer’s audio there for music from e.g. Spotify:

Next I started a Dummy Audio Device from Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration and made it the main output for the computer. I then connected the monitor of the dummy output to channels 1 and 2 of JackTrip using Patchance:

…and VIOLA! Even testing my microphone, there was so little latency it was imperceivable.

I’m envisioning a setup like this:

I’m excited to test this further! Overall, I feel like I’ve found a way to do a Dante-less audio-over-ethernet setup that cost me nothing!

When I began working on Ubuntu Studio, I was working for a large church. We were doing amazing things in our services every Sunday. Our video, audio, and lighting were top-notch, but the problem was that it was hard to replicate without spending thousands of dollars.

This made me frustrated when running services for our youth in the church’s youth center. I couldn’t use those same tools and didn’t have a budget to spend. This got me wondering what tools existed in the open-source world. Remembering my days of experimenting with Linux and multimedia, I remembered seeing audio plugins in Ubuntu Studio, so that was the first place I looked.

Back then, I thought, “What would it take to replace all of these Apple and Windows computers with Ubuntu Studio?” We could use that money we would otherwise spend on software, on stage lighting, projectors, and audio equipment upgrades. Unfortunately, at that time, we were missing key components. While the audio was top-notch, it was lacking a good video editor and good software for controlling DMX-based lighting. This isn’t even to mention lyric and presentation software, which couldn’t hold a candle to ProPresenter.

Fast forward to now. Just four years later, those problems are being solved. We have some amazing audio plugins, and more keep coming to the repositories. Harrison’s MixBus is one of the best Digital Audio Workstations on the market and works flawlessly. Kdenlive, the video editor we include, has matured dramatically, and keeps getting better. Besides that, BlackMagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is easy to install. For DMX lighting, we now have Q Light Controller Plus installed by default.

Lyric projection and presentation software out there was the final piece of the puzzle. Sure, OpenLP has been out there and has matured quite well, but it remains lacking in the usability department. However, I stumbled upon one thing that made me cry nearly tears of joy when I discovered it: FreeShow.

FreeShow reminded me of ProPresenter and operates very similarly. However, in some ways, it operates easier, because to set up another display, you just need a web browser to point it at the FreeShow presentation computer’s address. Same with the stage display. This was the application I had hoped would come about years ago.

FreeShow is being developed by Kristoffer Vassbø. It’s an application written in Electron. As such, to package it for Ubuntu, I had to go a non-traditional route and package it as a snap. This way, I could include it in Ubuntu Studio and complete the last piece of the puzzle for a full, out-of-the-box multimedia production system for churches. It will be included by default in Ubuntu Studio 22.10.

With that, I hope to find a church that would be willing to try Ubuntu Studio for its multimedia production needs. This could potentially save churches thousands of dollars per year that they could use for outreach in their local area, in their local region, or even to the ends of the earth!

This might be the unique ministry that God has been calling me to my whole life that I’ve been looking for.

However, I knew of Ubuntu Studio’s importance in Linux-based production and creativity, and, as the story goes, I answered a call to help keep it alive.

Fast-forward two years. Ubuntu Studio is doing very well. I have a team that I rely on to keep things running. I decided to look at Fedora to see how they were doing, only to find out Fedora Jam had not been released for Fedora 31, and there was an un-responded-to keepalive request for Jam.

This got me thinking: what if something happens to Ubuntu Studio and Ubuntu/Debian became no-longer viable options for audio production? With that in mind, I decided to do something about it and stepped-in to become Fedora Jam’s new maintainer.

As it stands now, Fedora Jam 32 looks like it will be a thing, although not quite what I have envisioned. Hence, even now, I’m working on items for inclusion in Fedora 33 that should make it an excellent choice for audio production on Linux.

All this said, I want to make it clear: I am not leaving Ubuntu Studio. I am in a situation where I can adequately lead both Ubuntu Studio and Fedora Jam. Besides, this gives me a great deal of experience with packaging for Debian-based and .rpm-based Linux distributions.

Overall, I say this is a win-win for everybody who does audio production using Linux. I can take what I’ve learned in Ubuntu and apply it to Fedora and vice-versa.

First thing I did was check-in to my hotel room, then I met up with Valorie Zimmerman (Kubuntu), Simon Quigley (Lubuntu), and quite a few others, including old friend Tyler Brown, and a few new faces such as Darin Miller.

From there Simon and I headed to the campus of Bellevue Technical College, the host of Linux Fest Northwest for this year and the previous 19 years. There were people eating and playing games around tables, and exhibitors setting up at their tables in the main exhibit hall. Although I was an exhibitor, I decided to set-up the next morning

So, bright and early, I got set-up in the main hall with my equipment to show-off Ubuntu Studio and its audio capabilities. Working the table was myself, Valorie, Simon, and Dustin Krysak (Ubuntu Budgie). But, after setting up, it was time for me to attend my first talk, given by Wes Payne of Jupiter Broadcasting about Audio on Linux. Was it any wonder that I chose that talk?

After the talk, I spent time back at the Ubuntu table demonstrating Ubuntu Studio. I was amazed at how much attention it garnered, and had people asking me questions about it. Many had never even heard of Ubuntu Studio, and many thought the project had died. Those people decided to give it a nice look again, and some for the first time.

Afterwards, I watched Simon give a talk about “Open Source is More Than Just GitHub” and got to finally meet Alan Pope (Canonical) for the first time, even though we had communicated many times over the past several years.

Then it was back to the Ubuntu table for more demos, answering questions, handing out stickers, and having great conversations. It was overall a great time, and Valorie has mandated that I join her at the Ubuntu table at SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux Festival) in Seattle this year.

Before last talk of the day, I decided to tear down my equipment to keep from going back to the table. I attended Simon’s other talk: Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo and Beyond. Unfortunately, I ran late and just as I walked in the room, Simon was talking about Ubuntu Studio. Apparently perfect timing, but took me a little while to get my bearings and get caught up. Being there I was officially in my role as a flavor lead along with Valorie, Simon, and Dustin, with Martin Wimpress (Canonical & Ubuntu MATE) and Alan giving Canonical’s perspective. The future of each flavor was talked about, and discussions were opened for each flavor lead to address any questions in the room.

Afterwards, Jupiter Broadcasting and System 76 served a barbecue dinner for any that attended. It was a great time as I, formerly involved with Jupiter Broadcasting, got to catch up with old friends and meet new members of the community.

I headed back to my hotel room fairly early while more shenanigans took place, I headed to bed. I guess night-time parties are quickly hitting my “Murtaugh List.” (I’m getting to old for this…. stuff.)

The next morning, I got to the college early and got my equipment set-up for more demos, which was pointedly more sparse as Sunday tends to be less busy. I headed to two talks that day. The first one I went to was by Ell Marquez entitled “Building Your Community by Poisoning Your Own Well”, where we learned her struggles with Impostor Syndrome, which is something I struggle with as well. Then I saw Emma Marshall’s talk entitled “sudo apt install happiness”, where she talked about System 76’s approach to customer service, which they call their “Happiness Team.” I couldn’t help but think of ways to use some of those methods when providing support to Ubuntu Studio users.

Afterwards, I headed to the Ubuntu table to pack-up and then head to the final keynote for Linux Fest Northwest 2019, which was a Q&A session with John “Maddog” Hall, Kyle Rankin, and our very own Simon Quigley. Once done there, I headed back to the hall, grabbed anything that was left, said goodbye, and headed home.

Overall, it was a great experience, and I plan to go again next year. Next stop, whether I want to or not per Valorie, is SeaGL 2019.

I will be demonstrating Ubuntu Studio and my audio setup.

I also have a few giveaways for fans of Ubuntu Studio fans. After all, nearly everybody loves vinyl stickers.

I even put a couple of them on my pickup truck! (The Tux sticker is from HelloTux, where you can pick up some amazing Ubuntu Studio clothing!)

I look forward to seeing you there! Also attending (that I know of) will be Valorie Zimmerman (Kubuntu), Dustin Krysak (Ubuntu Budgie), Simon Quigley (Lubuntu), Martin Wimpress (Ubuntu MATE, Canonical), and Alan Pope (Canonical). It’s going to be a blast!

If you don’t know my story on how I got into Linux, it’s about time I told it. It was almost 3 years ago. My son had just been born, and I had some pretty outdated photography software. I was running Adobe Lightroom 1.0 (or something like that) and Creative Suite 3. Sadly, those were the highest I could go without upgrading my Power Mac G4 to an Intel mac. Additionally, this same computer would no longer run the latest versions of Firefox. I was pretty stuck.

The real key in my workflow was Lightroom. Unfortunately, I had a really small budget. Also, it was likely that, much to my chagrin, I was going to have to go back to Windows. So, I searched for alternatives. This is where alternativeto.net came in handy.

The only viable alternative was a program called Darktable which does not run on Windows, but Linux as well as Intel Macs. Same situation, except this time there was a potential solution.

Having dabbled with Slackware in 1997 an Ubuntu in 2009, I decided to give Ubuntu a try again. This time I was blown away. The Unity interface felt comfortable, especially coming from the OS X world. Also, Darktable was a great replacement for Lightroom, and Gimp was a good replacement for PhotoShop.

The only thing missing was RAW to DNG conversion that Lightroom could do internally. I convert to DNG because it’s a fairly universal and open format, and has lossless compression which saves disk space. The only solution I could find that ran natively under Linux was Digikam with its Kipi plugins, which ran best and integrated best with the KDE Plasma desktop.  This got my switching to Kubuntu.

Unfortunately, being comfortable with my OSX-like workflow, Plasma turned out to be too windows-like. Don’t get me wrong, it can be customized very well, and the tools are excellent. But, from a photographer standpoint, it’s just too cumbersome.

Fortunately, I found out that I can run the standard Windows version of the Adobe DNG converter with WINE. This seems to work fine for my needs.

So, to stay at the most up-to-date software, I’ve been using Fedora 21 with its default desktop environment (GNOME Shell 3.14). Although not a “rolling” distribution (which tends to have breakages in my experience), it seems to always have the latest versions of software.

My workflow is as follows:

IMPORT: I use Rapid Photo Downloader. This organizes my photos by year and date into my library.

CONVERT: For this step, I use Adobe DNG converter to convert the RAW files to DNG. I discard the raw files as the conversion to DNG is lossless.

EDIT AND DEVELOP: This is where Darktable comes in. From there I can mark my picks and adjust the photos that I pick, retouching in GIMP as needed. From there, I export into my main photo library as JPEG.

ORGANIZATION: For this I use Shotwell as it can create custom albums and export to social media. This is where I simply keep my photos as it serves as a logical replacement for iPhoto for me.

What do you use? Let me know in the comments.

In April of this year, I was gifted a touchscreen laptop preloaded with Windows 8.1. I had experienced Windows 8 prior to this, but was not impressed with it until I experienced it on a touchscreen. With the touchscreen (but only with the touchscreen), it is an extremely friendly interface. As long as you know how to swipe from the sides, top, or bottom, you’re good to go.

However, I’m a Linux user. At the time, I was using openSUSE 13.1 as my daily driver. I managed to take my installation(s) from my old machine and move it to my new machine using Clonezilla. However, it wouldn’t boot until I had converted it to be used with UEFI (a post for another time, perhaps).

I had two openSUSE installations: one GNOME, one KDE. Being the experimenter I am, I tried the touchscreen experience with both. I was unimpressed. Knowing of Ubuntu’s vision for touchscreen, I decided to install Ubuntu 14.04. I was blown away by how good the touchscreen support was in Unity.

Since then, I have evaluated the main Linux desktop environments with their touchscreen gesture support. Here my evaluation:

LXDE/LXQt

Nonexistant. In this case, I can understand because the developers have no desire to support touchscreen gestures. The target for these/this desktop is for older computers that need as little overhead as possible while still having a complete desktop, and very few (if any) of those machines have touchscreens.

Xfce

Nonexistant. Again, a situation where the developers have no desire to support touchscreens. In fact, seeing the “sloth on benadryl stuck in molasses in January” development style of this desktop, I cant imagine it will ever support touchscreen gestures.

MATE

Again, nonexistant. Since the MATE desktop is a fork of the GNOME 2.x desktop, and is targeted at users that miss GNOME 2.x, I doubt touchscreen gesture support would come to fruition. However, knowing at least one of the developers, I wouldn’t put it past them for a distant future additional feature.

Cinnamon

Though this desktop is forked from the newer GNOME 3.x desktop, any and all touchscreen gesture support is nonexistant. Understandable, since the target users for this desktop are similar to those of the MATE desktop, as Cinnamon is intended to have the GNOME 2.x experience on GNOME 3.x technology.

KDE Plasma (4 and 5)

This one is tricky. The Homerun Launcher amazingly supports touchscreen one-finger gestures, but the rest of the experience in Plasma is lackluster at best. KDE did have Plasma Active going for a while, but it was really targeted toward tablets without any vision of touchscreen laptops or desktops. As such, it has no mouse or keyboard support that I could find. If KDE could merge Plasma with the features of Plasma Active sometime in the 5.x releases, they might have something going. I do know the vision is there, and Aaron Seigo did at least touch on this.

GNOME 3.12

This showed promise with the Activities Overview and certain GNOME apps being the only real area to support touch gestures. Dragging windows was fairly straightforward using the titlebar, but trying that on Qt apps would crash GNOME Shell. This wouldn’t be fixed until…

GNOME 3.14

As of this writing, GNOME 3.14 has yet to go stable in any distro. I’ve been trying the beta (3.13.92) on my laptop in Fedora 21 Alpha, which probably has a few more bugs than the stable release. Gone is the Qt app dragging bug, and the new gesture support is really coming along. Also, gesture support is now native to GTK 3.14, but until developers for 3rd party (read: non-GNOME) apps and distros are willing to support it, it’s mostly going to be confined to the GNOME Apps.

Ubuntu/Unity

Since Ubuntu 14.04 was released back in April, Unity’s support of touchscreen gestures has been absolutely amazing and second-to-none. None of this should be surprising considering the comittment to moblie devices such as tablets and smartphones. The touchscreen gestures in Unity are, in my opinion, much more intuitive than the GNOME 3.14 offerings. For example, in GNOME 3.14, to drag a window, you must use a single finger to drag the window via its titlebar. In Unity, you can drag a window from any point in the window by using three fingers to move it. Additionally, simply tapping the window with three fingers will not only allow you to drag the window with one finger in the center, but you can also resize the window with 8 other touchpoints shown on the window (that fade after 1 second of inactivity). The touchscreen support is so integrated into the Unity desktop that Ubuntu has enabled the touchscreen support in Chromium by default! I can’t get touchscreen support in any other browser or desktop without addons.

Touchscreen computers are not going away anytime soon. In my opinion, with the exception of Unity, this is a place where Linux desktop is severly lacking and behind. As these touchscreen laptops and desktops become more common, we, as a Linux community, need to become more proactive (rather than reactive) on how to support and integrate these technologies. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to appear to the rest of the world like we’re computing in the dark ages.