As we saw last week, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth envisions the advent of Ubuntu phones, tablets and TVs in the near future. But the open source world’s best hope for conquering emerging hardware arguably lies in Plasma Active, a young project which has quietly been making huge progress lately in the world of mobile platforms. Will it beat Ubuntu?

It’s pretty likely that Canonical’s efforts for bringing Ubuntu to mobile hardware will involve Unity, the company’s homegrown interface designed to work well on traditional and mobile screens alike. And if it creates a version of Ubuntu targeted at mobile devices, the platform will almost certainly be a spin of the standard Ubuntu flavor, not a new operating system built from the ground up.

In other words,