Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 Release | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 Release

ubports.com

115 pointsreddotX28 comments

This is a great project.

I ran Ubuntu Touch a few years ago, when Canonical supported it, and eventually gave up because I didn't think it was polished enough.

I came back to Ubuntu Touch a month or two ago out of frustration with Android, and it is much less buggy than it used to be, I'm very pleased with it.

My only issue is that the best phone (AFAIK) to run it on is a OnePlus One, which is quite old and slow compared to more modern phones.

But it's such a breath of fresh air to be using a mobile OS that isn't nagging you to sign in to Google, sign up for a Samsung account, install the latest OneDrive app, accept location sharing, agree to the terms and conditions, etc. And it's all open source and hackable, the Terminal app is a first-class citizen. It's great.

Out of curiosity I checked what the process is to port Ubuntu Touch to an unsupported smartphone. Apparently one of the requirements is that it needs to have an existing source-available port of LineageOS 12 or 14. Which is a bit limiting, of course, and I wonder why that restriction is in place.

Ubuntu Touch/UBPorts is intended to run on kernels that have been patched for AOSP, with libhybris being used for driver support. The LineageOS project (well, individual device maintainers most of the time) does all the dirty work of getting the kernel to build, and run something like a baseline AOSP environment on the device. I'm pretty sure that requiring support from the mainline kernel would be a lot more limiting.

Even with a Lineage device tree ready you really don't want to try to port it, trust me. I've spent weeks to try to port it to my old Galaxy S4 and just gave up at some point. It's very difficult even with the work done by Lineage.

What kind of issues were there?

Would a newer phone have worked better?

Plenty of issues, so first just setting up the environment is already quite complex, then I had to do various patch to the device tree to get the test image working and the test image kernel booting. The only thing I managed to do was getting a shell and having the vibrator working, apart from that, all the other libhybris tests were failing with segfaults and I could not understand why.

> Would a newer phone have worked better?

Difficult to say, I'd say that each phone is likely to have issues in different ways.

I bought my OnePlus One (second-hand, last year) specifically to run Ubuntu Touch. I tried it out, and really what drove me to putting LineageOS on it wasn't the battery life or the lack of apps (lack of apps was a plus in my opinion) but the fact that the browser couldn't display Slack in a way that I could use it. I am going to try out this new version and if Slack works, I'm keeping it.

It seems ridiculous that one webapp would cause a change in OS, but it really is an essential tool for me.

Slack was working in the browser recently (albeit slowly), but they have recently rolled out a change which just point-blank refuses to run on Morph's user-agent :(

The good thing about everything being a web app is that it's inherently cross-platform. /s

Have you tried https://open-store.io/app/slack-base-webapp-chat?

Yes, I tried that. No, it didn't help, unfortunately.

Sorry to hear that!

Someone on r/LGV20 was working on getting bits and pieces of full Ubuntu running on their LG V20 a few months ago. He did some legwork to get things like bluetooth working. Maybe his work would translate to Ubuntu Touch, and then that's a slightly newer phone it could run on.

Congratulations to UBports! Keeping Ubuntu Touch going as a viable project, and expanding the community and range of devices has been a real achievement.

It's interesting to note that the number of developers involved has grown recently - and I would expect that to continue.

I think the opportunity to buy a new device with UBports UT preinstalled, as the Pinephone and later iterations of the Librem5 should offer, will be a real shot in the arm for the project.

Congratulations again!

Archive.org mirror https://web.archive.org/web/20191024100132/https://ubports.c...

https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/blob/master/README.m...

The devices supported are quite old. What are the blockers for a recent phone? Are bootloaders not unlockable? Are drivers not available?

Supported Devices:

Devices device: arale: This issue affects the Meizu MX 4.

device: bacon: This issue affects the Oneplus One.

device: cooler: This issue affects the Bq M10 HD tablet

device: deb: This issue affects the Nexus 7 2013 LTE.

device: flo: This issue affects the Nexus 7 2013 Wi-Fi.

device: FP2: This issue affects the Fairphone 2

device: frieza: This issue affects the Bq M10 FHD tablet.

device: hammerhead: This issue affects the Nexus 5.

device: krillin: This issue affects the Bq E4.5.

device: mako: This issue affects the Nexus 4.

device: manta: This issue affects the Nexus 10 tablet

device: turbo: This issue affects the Meizu Pro 5.

device: vegetahd: This issue affects the Bq E5.

device: w7: This issue affects the LG L90.

Pinephone and Librem5 are work in progress and the former should be ready 'soon'.

About the latter https://web.archive.org/web/20191021165629/https://ubports.c...

For porting UT to Android based devices, see http://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction.html

WIP: The Librem Phone devkit can run Ubuntu Touch (the ubports teams is waiting the final device to make sure everything inegrates well, so it need more work)

WIP: The Pine Phone is, too, having ubuntu touch

blocker? when you want to port a new device, you will need time, patience, and knoweldge. The team always welcome new people that want to port a new device ;)

So yep if there is a need of more contributor to port anywhere the project, you also need good devices documentation from manufaturers, hoping there are no dark blobs (spoiler-alert: everywhere), etc. To avoid most of this, ubuntu touch use lxc, many things, and halium, if you are interested into that stuff, have a look at http://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction.html

I used Ubuntu touch once and liked it. It just didn’t have an app or two I needed or else I would have stuck with it

I had tried this for over 2 months in my Moto G(2014) (my secondary phone). The experience was good as I only needed the phone for text and call. But, battery life was bad as compared to say lineage or other ROMs.

Happy to see, it's still in development. Might give another try if it's getting developed for titan.

I like how the server crashed even though the website has CloudFlare... They could've easily added caching for HTML resources...

A (working) syncthing app is still the major thing missing from Ubuntu Touch for me to be able to use it in a serious way.

Isn't it just a real GNU/Linux system on ARM? So couldn't you just go grab the official syncthing binary and runn it yourself from a terminal and use the web interface?

I suppose that's an empirical question. I'm not sure what happens to apps run from the terminal in Ubuntu Touch when they're not the currently active application (i.e. whether it will run properly in the background). Having an app-ified version would be ideal though, so I could do things like on Android when I have syncthing disabled unless the device in on AC power.

You can use you rsync, or you use the great NextCloud syncyng app "ubsync" : https://open-store.io/app/ubsync

edit: didnt read "syncthing" as a existing cloud solution, but just as any "syncing" solution

Syncthing is an opensource tool to sync between machines. It's like rsync in cron.

I don't see any reason why it won't compile for Ubuntu, it's GNU Linux.

Down for me.

I'm always puzzled when sites that provide static content go down.

Is there a reason not to use a CDN these days?

Is it for privacy reasons, so the CDN providers do not get the info who accessed that page?

The server is another victim of HN traffic

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