Five hundred days using Ubuntu Phone | Hacker News Reader

Five hundred days using Ubuntu Phone

bobthegnome.blogspot.com

134 pointscujanovic87 comments

A little hard to take seriously considering the author works for Canonical. Even so the author didn't seem very excited about it, it felt more like an acceptable phone and not that it's better than Android or iOS.

I'd go further than "little hard to take seriously".

Nowhere in the article does he state that his employer is Canonical. His blog doesn't mention it at all, just says he's "Involved with Gnome". Even clicking through to his "Complete Profile" takes me to a G+ page. From there another "About" link click finally tells me that he's an employee of Canonical.

Sure, he didn't claim its the 2nd coming of the FSM but stating any potential conflict of interest is pretty standard. A 1 sentence comment on HN from a related employee/founder/ceo usually has a disclaimer about it.

It's a blogpost, made to express an opinion, so he doesn't have to say this. If this was supposed to be a serious article, or was involved in a serious debate, then it would be a different issue.

Second, I have a Firefox phone and no other phone. It's terrible right? Yet I'm happy with it, as it is less buggy than my previous phone, and it actually does what I want. The only thing that I'd like from it would be flac support, but it's something I can get around with a simple script. So, I can see how somebody could be able to live with a Ubuntu phone, and don't need to be paid to say good things about it.

Also, not throwing money at Apple/Google/Microsoft is a a big motivation, and a great pleasure.

Not only is it a personal blog, he did not post the article here. I don't know if he's even aware that it's now on HN. Expectations of disclosures seem absurd.

And at least it seems like Canonical is dogfooding. These wasn't an in-depth review that struck me as masquerading as an objective write up from a non-bias source.

There is no requirement legally or from an accreditation board, sure.

However you should always do this in any context where it may come up. It's not just that this is the ethical path (it is) but failing to do so and getting caught out really undermines your credibility and thereby whatever message you were trying to get across (serious or no). There is literally no downside to doing this unless you are trying to obfuscate your connection.

Nonsense. "View my complete profile" takes you to the G+ page, and directly underneath his name it says he works for canonical. So what if his personal blog doesn't disclaimer everything in it - the information was one click away. You're just looking for excuses, really.

This new HN where everyone is complaining of 'clickbait' titles and demanding disclaimers everywhere for things like personal blog posts... it's starting to get pretty tiresome.

> Nonsense. "View my complete profile" takes you to the G+ page, and directly underneath his name it says he works for canonical. So what if his personal blog doesn't disclaimer everything in it - the information was one click away.

View my complete profile links to https://plus.google.com/106527694663794732344 which shows his name and the number of followers he has.

A further click on "About" in the header, shows that he is an employee of Canonical.

> You're just looking for excuses, really.

Actually I was looking for confirmation or denial of his previously unstated employment by Canonical, the company whose OS runs on the device he reviewed without making mention of his conflict of interest.

> This new HN where everyone is complaining of 'clickbait' titles and demanding disclaimers everywhere for things like personal blog posts... it's starting to get pretty tiresome.

This is nothing to do with HN. He posted a review of a product that his employer is directly related to, and made no mention of who he works for. Most people I know would consider it fishy to not make any mention at all of your involvement with a product you're reviewing.

just to clear up a misunderstanding between you and vacri you're responding to: Google seems to be in the process of yet another redesign of G+.

If you haven't yet enabled the new experience then the employer is stated quite prominently directly on that link. This is what vacri was referring to.

If you enable the new experience, then yes, you are right, you have to click one more time.

Yes. I'm splitting hairs here - this should probably have been on the blog-post front and center, but still. You two are not seeing the same content.

That depends on what version of G+ you're using, what he stated was true for me until I "upgraded" to the new G+.

http://imgur.com/a/5eqEf

Leaving aside that he works for Canonical, it is unfair to judge phone solely on "Author didn't seem very excited about it".

Different people have different ways of expressing themselves. You can't expect everyone to write like Kathy Sierra's piece on iPhone (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...)

A few points:

1. It's the author's personal blog.

2. The author didn't submit it here, they just put it up on their personal blog. They didn't pretend to be unbiased and then publish a story on a tech news site. They have no responsibility to you just because you found it via a news aggregation site.

3. The author could have easily done this on their own time without any employer involvement at all.

4. Just because the author works for Canonical does not necessarily mean they have any connection to the phone project.

5. The author's employer may have a policy against identifying as a part of the company on personal websites (but no similar policy for social media).

Funny we're often warned we must identify ourselves when publicly praising/reviewing our own products, lest we run foul of the FTC. They are UK based though so perhaps its different there.

I tried to like mine (BQ E5). But for an almost-flagship Ubuntu phone, reception was terrible. Went back to the Nexus (now 5x), and I've had zero issues in the same places I used my E5.

Maybe once they've polished a bit, it may be worth going back.

Corollary: I'll throw anyone money who can make a good (usable) Debian phone. Still waiting :(

It always astounds me how many reviews of "phones" fail to mention phone-like qualities such as reception and ability of the mic to filter out background noise. These are all I care about when choosing a phone. Yet you can find 10-page reviews of phones in which nothing discussed would lead you to understand it's a phone.

They just cater to the audience, I suppose. The call features are a rather minor feature for many people nowadays -- I checked my call log, and it was 11 incoming+outgoing calls within the last 30 days.

It'll change if/when you have kids. You'll probably have a half-dozen calls a day coordinating things. And having a high quality connection for those calls is really important.

> It'll change if/when you have kids. You'll probably have a half-dozen calls a day coordinating things.

So much organising is done over WhatsApp nowadays that we have an old Samsung phone just to run that app, with only appropriate contacts loaded.

I'm not a fan of proprietary messaging but I can see that it is a lot more efficient for organisers than making a call to every parent.

I don't recall having made a voice call on it in months.

Hold on.......you can use smartphones to call people!?!?!

There seems to be more than a few of us for whom phone functionality is the least useful or used feature of our pocket computer. Meat-space happens in real-time, phone interactions are mostly asynchronous in my case (SMS, chats, etc). Mapping, notes, calendars/reminders, search and of course photos are used a lot more. But yes, in the occasion of actually needing a phone call it sure is annoying when your device can barely handle it.

There is a certain absurdity to it when I watch my friend trying to get the voice recognition to write a whatsapp message (over the handsfree system) while driving, when phoning would clearly make more sense. The voice recognition doesn't appear to work very well.

I basically never use the traditional phone features of my "phone" if I can avoid it. Talking on the phone is boring because voice is a synchronous protocol with low information density. I'd rather spend a few seconds every few minutes typing something back and forth so I can keep doing something interesting while information exchange happens in the background. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to talk with someone, I'd rather do it in person, where it is a rewarding social activity.

So I imagine those reviews of phones are simply written for people more like me than like you.

I have a BQ Aquaris 4.5 (for almost a year now I think). I have had no reception problems whatsoever. Are you sure you don't have a dud?

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, though not on the phone side.

Yes, it's certainly not a general problem (and seems unlikely to be due to running Ubuntu). I don't work for Canonical.

re Debian: your best bet is one of the chroot on Android apps. With some more skills you can get closer to just Debian on a phone that shipped with Android. Unfortunately with the way mobile devices are created, you'll probably never get a new device from mass-market mobile device vendors that will run mainline Linux and so Debian will never support mass-market mobile devices. OTOH, you can run mainline Linux on ancient devices like the N900 or on expensive not yet built devices from non-traditional phone makers like the N900 or Pyra.

https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile#Articles http://elinux.org/N900 http://neo900.org/ https://pyra-handheld.com/

Why chroot? I've got a Debian install on microsd, with a script that symlinks it into the root. The only conflict I've seen so far is /dev/log. Hangouts may crash more, but when doesn't it?

Granted the only thing I really do with it is tinc/unison to sync photos. What I'm mostly missing is a keyboard, which I imagine could be filled by a portable chording one that I've yet to find.

The chroot apps are the easiest and most integrated way to have both Debian and Android installed and running at the same time. If you have the skills to do more advanced things, obviously that is better for you. With skills you can also completely get rid of Android and run a Debian UI.

Re (physical) keyboard, check out the Pyra/Neo900.

Problem I have: I need my banking app, my bank id app and instant-bank-money-transfer app that doesn't exist for Ubuntu Phone.

Without those apps, paying invoices takes too much time. I can't transfer money to my CC when I need it and I can't transfer money to my friends.

But worst of all, I can't login to 90% of all the governmental services that require bank id. They all exist for my Windows Phone though, which is an underdog enough for me.

Doesn't the bank have a web-application with feature parity with their Android and IOS apps? I would expect to be able to do the same things with on-line banking, regardless of the operating system I run or device I use (provided I have a modern web browser).

I would guess staticelf lives in Sweden just based on the apps they mentioned. If that is the case, yes, you can access most of the major banks online, but to do anything like paying bills or transferring money to accounts which are not yours, you basically need to use a 2FA. Either some kind of hardware fob or the Bank ID app staticelf mentioned.

Personally I could never move away from a plattform without support for the Bank ID application, I use it multiple times a day to authenticate / sign stuff, and keeping the hardware fob with me is too cumbersome. And as staticelf noted, all of the non-bank sites (e.g government services) don't even support the hardware fobs.

Yes the issue is that the Swedish governtment refuses to implement it's own identification platform so now "bank id" has become the facto standard.

Bank id is a closed solution and thus will render using any other device than android, ios or windows phone a pain in the butt.

Problem I have: I am dependent on MEGAcorp. MEGAcorp does not like freedom. So free solutions are not good.

Do you see the problem?

> Do you see the problem?

You think Canonical is a bastion of free software? Is that the problem? I'm pretty sure that's the problem.

The point I'm making does not involve Canonical. When discussing a switch to Linux, most people answer with something like "oh but it should support X (MEGAcorp product) so I can't switch". It should support .docx, or whatever latest proprietary protocols. And when this is implemented, there will be a new shiny closed thing to have.

Also, in its current form your comment is just a Perfect Solution Fallacy.

except docx is an open format..

Nominally, OOXML is an open format. But in practice it is littered with legacy Microsoft Office stuff only Word can do right and weird hacks. LibreOffice/OpenOffice do a good job in implementing OOXML, but despite these efforts .docx documents often have lots of little issues when opened outside of Microsoft Office.

Compare the OOXML standard's 6000 pages to ODF's 600. I have worked with both for the purpose of generating documents from scratch, and OOXML is a monster.

Not to mention the ballot-stuffing that occurred to get OOXML accepted as an ISO-standard…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

>"oh but it should support X (MEGAcorp product) so I can't switch".

> It should support .docx, or whatever latest proprietary protocols. And when this is implemented, there will be a new shiny closed thing to have.

This is fascinating. The word you're looking for is "features".

Consumers want this annoying little thing called "cutting edge features".

I've literally in my entire life developing software never seen someone find a way to cast "feature seeking users" as the bad people addicted to MEGAcorp or whatever.

On the surface, your entire argument appears to be that if regular users didn't constantly want well polished and shiny new features, open source software would be successful.

>This is fascinating. The word you're looking for is "features".

This is fascinating. You are confusing "features" with "interacting with closed software".

Want to take an example? Go have a look at Krita. It has so many "cutting edge features" it's impressive, and many people honestly think that it's better than Photoshop. Yet what I would even say is its biggest problem is its inability to open PS brushes. Now if you spent some time on HN, you must have read about the sheer horror that is the PSD format. So it's not just comparing the two softwares on an objective basis.

Hey Krita is a great case to make but I would characterize it as the "exception to the rule" not the rule of open source software.

Photoshop is a bit of a leviathan and it's odd how no one has ever really competed with it strongly and the software has certainly suffered from its lack of real competition.

There's also the reality that its primary users -- designers, photographers, digital artists and the likes, aren't usually programmers or techie people who use a large variety of complicated software, and so for its primary users, they know Photoshop like they know their Canon, they know the details of the brand and setup and change is hard for them as well.

EDIT: To corroborate this last paragraph with an anecdote, I asked a digital artist friend of mine if she'd used Krita, and her reply was: "I'm leery of open source though. like great for devianart and stuff but often find saving problems, glitches etc", so that helps demonstrate how ingrained artists can be to their tools.

Krita seems great -- but that doesn't make Ubuntu better than W10 or OSX, and it doesn't mean that LibreOffice is in the same decade as Word and/or 360 or Google Docs, etc etc.

>MEGAcorp product

Except only MEGAcorp product is competitive. Sorry, the GIMP doesn't replace photoshop and GnuCash doesn't replace my accounting suite.

Maybe FOSS needs to try harder to compete with MEGAcorp product instead of mocking people. The year of the linux desktop didn't happen for a reason. Stop pretending the problem isn't the product.

>Sorry, the GIMP doesn't replace photoshop

See my other comment and go have a look at Krita.

>Except only MEGAcorp product is competitive.

Are you denying the existence of VLC, Firefox, and other successful OSS?

>Maybe FOSS needs to try harder to compete with MEGAcorp product instead of mocking people.

Who in free software has been mocking you? Is it that trolly Linus? Darn, he just never stops.

I respect your sentiments in this thread, but I would've felt mocked at if I were at the receiving end of your comments.

I've used Linux on my primary machines for about 14 years. It's running on close to a dozen devices within a dozen feet of me right now.

If a user has need X, the user should use a solution that suits need X. Shoehorning a solution that doesn't meet the requirements still leaves need X unmet.

Desktop Linux meets (some, not all of) my needs. It does not meet my mom's, partner's, most friends' and colleagues' needs.

Behind the right interface, Linux does meet millions of users' mobile needs however.

I don't think it has anything to do with MEGAcorp not liking freedom in this case, the problem is just money here, no? As in, MEGAbank not wanting to spend time a.k.a. money developping their apps for a platform with < 0.1% (or whatever the market share of Ubuntu Phone currently is) of their userbase on it. Note that the same tends to happen for Windows Phone, so there goes your freedom argument as well? I've also seen the same happen for MINIcorps often enough btw, maybe even more cause they have even less resources.

I am all for free solutions, but I am not willing to put up with a much lesser experience just to prove a point. Even if I and hundreds of other developers were, they would still not exist for ubuntu phone because developers are such a minority.

That is also only the external "must haves" I require from my phone. But I've heard from people that actually owns an ubuntu phone that it's buggy, laggy and are just not well polished. One individual actually flashed his phone and installed android on it because he couldn't put up with the software anymore.

So yeah, I am a MEGAcorp user. Who cares? It helps me with my daily life and I am happy with it. MEGAcorp is not necessarily bad.

What does "33 minutes talk time" on http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices mean?

Why does it show that on the lock screen?

I suppose you tell it how many minutes you plan contains and it subtracts used time accordingly.

The phone self-destructs after 33 minutes to safeguard against the FBI. ;)

Actually it is a safeguard against the TSA

I've always seen 'talk time' as how many minutes you can actively be in a phone call before the battery dies. If that is the case this phone is pretty unimpressive.

I understood it as the phone is currently on a call that has been in progress for 33 minutes, but it seems as though I might have been the only one to draw that conclusion.

Various personalised stats show. Each dot around the circle is a day of the month with the current day highlighted. In the centre it will show things like number of minutes, sms sent/received, photos taken, tracks played, miles walked etc. The balloons around the edge are larger on days when you do more. So you get a personal visual representation of how you use your phone.

Disclaimer (because it seems to upset people here), I work for Canonical ;)

I have been using the Aquaris 4.5 for probably ~300 days and I am still impressed how much Canonical has fucked up the Linux-powered smartphone idea. I could go on a long rant here, but there is one thing that pisses me off the most:

In order to gain access to the software repository (the "App Store") and receive updates for installed software, you have to have a registered ubuntu one account activated on the phone.

Excuse my language, but what the fucking hell?

I'm curious, what is the issue here?

Is there some sort of ethical or technical deep end that they dove into that causes you to not only swear, but to swear twice (and once without apologizing for it!!)?

Because, really... if requiring a more-or-less anonymous account is the biggest problem you have with it, I have a hard time understanding how you can say: "I am still impressed how much Canonical has fucked up the Linux-powered smartphone idea"

No, it is not only the mandatory account, but for a free platform this is a huge red flag for me. See, I come from using the N900 (to some extent I still do). While not everything was/is golden with maemo, Ubuntu Touch in comparison sucks big time:

- on UT all packages you want to install have to be "click"-packages (bye bye debianic universe of free software)

- good luck with using a microSD to extend storage; as per permissions it is impossible for applications to use a folders on SD (great fun if you want to download podcasts).

- webkit based browser with no plugin/addon support. With some sarcasm, I am actually grateful for this: I had no idea how terrible the world is without an ad/js-blocker.

And for the account thingy: can you enlighten me with a good reason why one needs an account to download free software?

To me, the platform feels terribly "corporate", as if more effort was put into allowing for monetization instead of distributing linux for smartphones.

Can anyone name adequate phones with FOSS operating systems that aren't Android forks? I think that's what many of us are looking for.

I think this is it ATM. I agree, I'd pay a good chunk of money for an actuall-Debian phone, but AFAIK, they don't exist

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439568

Thanks. I'd rather not run chroot though. Tends to be slow, bulky, and doesn't address a lot of what I actually want out of a linux phone

A chroot is simply a Debian install, not sure why it would be slower or bulkier than a normal Debian install.

What do you want out of a Linux phone?

It's slower and bulkier because the underlying android OS is still running.

Some things I want that android/chroot doesn't offer:

A good terminal interface

To be able to script things that, to my knowledge, a chroot doesn't let you: texting, change alarms, sounds, etc.

A real browser, not a mobile browser

A phone that is actually free (as in speech)

And these are just off the top of my head in the past 5 minutes. If I actually sat and thought about it, I'm sure I could come up with many more.

Re bulk: OK, that makes sense. If you are able to either update the bootloader configuration or modify the initramfs then you can boot directly into a chroot without Android running.

http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/

I wonder if any of these terminals work for you:

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=terminal&fdi... https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=terminal&fdi...

A chroot will indeed not be able to change Android things.

I would guess "real browser"s are either too slow or memory bloated to work on mobile devices and either way their UI isn't going to be usable on a small touchscreen device probably..

When you talk about free as in speech, there are so many layers there it is hard to know which parts you are talking about, here are some:

Do you want the minerals used to not be involved with wars, slavery, suicide in factories and other nastiness? Fairphone is working on that but freedom on the software side is not really one of their goals.

Do you want the phone to be repairable rather than discarded every 2 years? Fairphone is working on that too and just came out with a modular device.

Do you want to run a patent-free CPU architecture with FLOSS-licensed CPU designs? RISC-V exists bit is in the early stages. lowRISC aims to produce ASICs but hasn't done so yet.

Do you want the phone case to be manufactured using the LulzBot libre 3D printer from FLOSS CAD designs produced in freecad or similar? The OpenMoko FreeRunner had libre designs but they weren't produced with libre tools IIRC and they were pretty chunky physically. The Neo900 case is just from discarded N900 devices, but the motherboard and baseband isolation features are excellent.

Do you want the baseband to be running FLOSS-licensed software? OsmocomBB only supports 2G and parts of it have to run outside the baseband.

Do you want the other chips (WiFi etc) to run FLOSS software? There are some (ath9k_htc, OpenFWWF, carl9170.fw, prism54 FreeMAC) but none of the WiFi chips typically used in phones and most are dead projects.

Do you want a FLOSS operating system that supports arbitrary mobile hardware? Mainline Linux doesn't support many mobile devices and the mobile device industry moves so fast that there isn't really time for them to upstream their code before shipping the device.

I recommend looking up bunnie huang's ideas about layers of freedom and the hardware world.

Sounds quite ok, but the question is when Meizu 5Pro comes out... March is already over, I hope it is not cancelled..

I use ubuntu on my phone the other way around, using Linux Deploy I chroot an ubuntu or debian root image and connect to it with ssh or vnc on android. It came in quite handy when streaming mp3 through icecast through the wifi accesspoint on my phone for a dancewalk through town.

Hardware wise, I can't really find what I want with an ubuntu phone: I like the spec and the price of the Aquaris E5, but the bezel is really huge. The Meizu mx4 lack of a SD slot and the Meizu 5Pro is too costly :(

I would miss whatsapp too... Not that I like the app, but it's commonly used within my group of friends.

Fix the two points above and you've go a buyer :)

At this point, I'd be fascinated by "alt-mobile" OS's that are simply the best of the bunch. That is, never mind about being comparable to iOS or Android, just simply the most user-friendly and reliable among the runner-ups. So is Ubuntu Mobile better than Firefox OS? Or Sailfish OS? Or even Windows Phone?

I'm wondering how people are doing with a Raspberry Pi phone.

See e.g. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piphone-home-made-raspberry...

So it does look like a viable phone platform, I'm glad to read that someone is happy with it!

All phone platforms are viable, it depends on what you expect from them...

I'm glad that Mozilla has finally given up on Firefox OS for phones. Maybe it's time for Canonical to do the same, and focus on improving Ubuntu.

It's kind of weird to trust Ubuntu store software more than Android stuff considering it's probably not sandboxed nearly as well

What's going on with open sourcing of Sailfish by the way? Jolla promised it several times already, but nothing happened.

The comparison of Android updates for non-Nexus devices versus this device is a little unfair.

This is pretty much the only Ubuntu phone with significant sales numbers. This is the result of a cooperation between Canonical and bq. This is pretty much the equivalent of a Nexus device for the Ubuntu phone platform.

When 95%+ of Android devices are non-Nexus, that means that's easily the majority experience of Android users.

I think that makes it fair.

It's an entirely unfair comparison - Canonical only has to support a single phone model, while Google would have to support hundreds.

It's the trade-off Google accepted for allowing their trademark on unsupported devices and having 80% of the mobile OS marketshare instead of 4%.

Ok, but when will apps be able to run when the screen is off? It seems sort of rediculous that the only way to listen to, say, Spotify is to leave the screen on and the Spotify app in the foreground.

How much money did you get to make this wonderland story?

His Canonical salary?

I appreciate all the negative points :) but I am also owner of the same phone, and list of terrible things goes like this:

- charging is unpredictable, I would like to attache some of the screen shots ... - You can not charge it while it is on ?! yes I know. If you do it will show it is full charged and then it will discharge in 30 minutes .. - Main apps do not exist (Skype, WhatsUp, Viber, etc... list is long ...), - although it is showing it has 4g most of the it does not work ... and it is not network issue, I have another phone ... - Camera will sometime save images that cannot be read after ... especially if battery is near to the end.

To say anything nice about phone or platform you must be high or someone has to pay you to post that...

The negative points worked though. This is a useful comment to make:

I am also owner of the same phone, and list of terrible things goes like this:

Whereas making insinuations about the author doesn't really provide anybody here anything of value.

> making insinuations

The author is an employee of the company that makes the OS for the phone, and didn't mention it in the specific article or on the header/sidebar of the blog. It's several clicks away on a Google+ profile.

> doesn't really provide anybody here anything of value

I disagree.

How much money did you get to make this wonderland story?

That's an insinuation regardless of what the truth is. As is stating that they would have to be high to write the article.

Stating that the author works for Canonical is not an insinuation.

That you are more concerned with someone suggesting an article was partially or fully affected by financial incentive, rather than the author not stating anything about his employer in said article, says a lot to me.

Here's a hint: you and I have very different priorities.

Sure, I believe that making baseless accusations of dishonesty is pernicious. I think it's even worse when it's easy to discover facts that would point to the potential for conflict of interest. I find it really disappointing how easy people are with accusation.

I'm not sure my not saying anything about the conflict of interest actually reveals much about how I feel about it.

Well I will not apologize for my sarcastic comment - customers nowadays are carpet bombed with a different kind of marketing strategists that somehow need to make us feel better about the "cat in the bag" of a product we buy, and there is point you have to say it is enough. If anything to protect any next naive customer, who is willing to try new gadget. It is worth mentioning, that I tried contacting the seller about all the issues I was experiencing but I haven't got any response.

So, if you are trying to sell me something in dishonest way, trying to beautify the product (old, dirty, smelly cat) saying something that does not represent, sarcasm is justified response.

Ubuntu has potential, maybe one day it will be a good platform if people put some effort into it, but now, and especially 500 days ago, was not that day.

It breaks HN's rules to post things like this. Please don't do it again.

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