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Comment by nico_h | Hacker News Reader

Anyone has experience using UBport, which seems to be the touch version of ubuntu?

I have been using UBports on my primary phone (Nexus 5) for the past year. It has been mostly great. All the expected things such as phone calls, text and web browsing work just fine. They have an app store with a fair number of apps, although obviously nowhere near to what is available for Android. Updates for the OS have been quite regular every few months. I have previously been using LineageOS on Nexus 5x, but personally I find UBports better. It is much closer to a real Linux distribution than Android, while still being a pretty usable mobile OS.

Apps are just webapps though and most of them are very poorly made. This has been my experience on mako.

Not all of them are webapps see https://open-store.io/?type=app

Yes but 99 percents are.

Not really. If you filter by the "App" category on OpenStore you get 18 pages of results and if you filter by "WebApp" you also get 18 pages of results. So, about 50% are webapps.

Because the filter you use includes all kind of crappy games. if you focus on other categories, the percentage is much higher.

Aren't most "apps" redundant considering you can install a program the way you would for a Linux distro? There are resources going back ages. I suppose they aren't designed for mobile, but could be tweaked.

Yes, I've been using Ubuntu Touch since 2015, as my only mobile OS on multiple devices, I'm also involved with the UBports Community, that maintains and develops the OS. I like it and it fits my needs, however it might not be for everybody, as there are way fewer apps, including some that many people expect to have.

However if you want to have an alternative OS, not based on Android, that is GNU/Linux with the necessary arquictecture changes to be reliable on a daily driver mobile devices, and that respects your privacy, then I believe it's the best choice.

I have been using it on my primary phone since ubuntu touch was discontinued (the phone is old and originally ran Ubuntu touch).

It is has always been pretty horrible, but in a nice simple way. The bugs in it are pretty blatant (e.g. on screen keyboard covering up pictures in picture messages) and some of the design decisions seem to have been wrong (the memory management seems so much worse than just doing nothing and letting things swap to disk ).

But I prefer predictable obviois bugs over things where the system oscar overly complicated (like an ipad which refuses to install updates and constantly asks for apple id confirmation codes that never appear).

Maybe other is better woth better hardware (Aquaris E5), but I am comparing it to the nokia n9 and find ot lacking overall.

Also, the autocorrect is horrible and I typed this message on the phone. So forgive any weirdness.

I'll forgive you if you explain who oscar is ;) I gave up trying to guess.

Haha, oscar = is = os with autocorrect.

another classic is abdicate = and = abd with autocorrect

Until recently, 22nd was 2nd = 2nd with autocorrect which was pretty bad.

It's 'Ubuntu Touch by UBports' but people just call it 'ubports' for short.

At https://forums.ubports.com/ you can get the gist of ubports and get answered any question you have as well.

Actually it's only Ubuntu Touch. The by UBports is used only to call attention to the broader community that does more than just Ubuntu Touch, we also have other projects around it that where craeted to serve our user and developer community.

I used ubports for a week once. I liked it. The only drawback is it lacked a handful of apps I needed (signal, authy, and anki I think)

A few years ago I heard they were working towards android app emulation. Might have been called Halium?

Halium 'is the collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android' (https://halium.org/). The project to support Android apps is called Anbox but it's mostly on hold for now.

There's a signal text messaging application, there're a few 2 factor authentication applications, I don't know what anki is.

Hallium is an hardware enablement abstraction layer. We use it to port Ubuntu Touch and other OS, to devices that where built to run android.

We are not working towards android app emulation, we are working for running apps natively. We're doing this by using anbox, which basically is an minimal android image, with just enough to run apps, and that image is running inside an lxc container. However that is very hard to put it to work fully (access to sensors is one of the problems), and we have been asking for help with that.

anki appears to have a Linux version on the website. Wouldn't that work? Even if it's not built for mobile.

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