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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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