I'm tempted to give it a try on my JingPad A1 tablet - it's running the previous 16.04 version at the moment which annoyingly doesn't have wireguard support built in.
I'm thrilled this exists, I just wish that there were more recent phones available for it. Most of the ones listed as supported are a bit long in the tooth now or not available for a North American audience.
The catch-22 of it is that if you have the ability to install this on your phone, you also have the ability to root it and fix most of what's wrong with android to begin with, while maintaining compatibility with your app library.
Lack of support is a big killer when it comes to Android. The OEM drops support after a few years, then it's pure luck whether some benevolent dev picks up maintenance of a FOSS ROM like LineageOS. My phone was that lucky for a good few years, but now support for it has been dropped.
I don't think I have the time or energy to work out how to bootstrap, port, and maintain an Android distro for my phone. Conversely, the rest of my systems run off mainline GNU/Linux, which I am able to set up and maintain. I'd be happy if I could get a phone with a similar experience.
Most modern (less than 5 years old) Android smartphones support Project Treble/GSI, which largely reduce the maintenance cost.
But that Treble technology is actually being used by ubports which does Ubuntu Touch using Android drivers, and porting Ubuntu Touch on any modern Android smartphones is quite easy nowadays (assuming you have kernel source code available). It pretty much just requires rebuilding kernel source code with different parameters and that's it.
> Had enough of Android? Replace it with a barely working unsecure ecosystems linux distro with effectively 0 adaption. Oh and youll still need an Android Phone for you messengers, bank accounts, ...
how your bank's push notifications work without native app? Recently I see there is fingerprint support in browsers on Android, but AFAIK it's quite new - have you had to enter password each time?
Tap and pay or paywave are the best thing to happen in mobile IMO. I don't even carry a wallet anymore. I had having to carry a phone and wallet. Now it's back down to only have to carry one thing. Perfect
Home is never far away. If something like that happened 99.9% of things can wait until I've been home to collect my wallet. Just as much chance if me loosing my wallet as most of the things you mentioned.
People already largely answered on many points, but I'll just answer on one point:
> unsecure
How is security defined? What is your threat model? If your threat model includes includes running random native binary blobs from random places like Android or iOS does, then yes, you can definitely consider it unsecure.
But that's NOT the target paradigm here, and if you consider it is, you're throwing away 90%+ of the GNU/Linux distributions out there. Last time I checked, running GNU/Linux on servers or desktops wasn't considered bad practice, quite the opposite.
Instead, it may be more secure than iOS, depending on your usage, because the paradigm is to install only opensource software that you actually trust.
Screenshots! The first thing most people want when evaluating an operating system for a personal device is a screenshot. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the case of a screenshot, you can choose what’s in it to visually communicate key features. I’ve been digging around the site for several minutes and I have yet to find a single one.
Absolutely -- I wouldn't touch ubuntu on a personal device, but UBPorts is well known as the cleanest and most performant desktop for the PinePhone user-base. I'd rather port it than use the other leading mobile desktops (or Ubuntu Touch). They've done great work.
How do they take control away from you? Under the hood every Linux distro is just a collection of packages. You can install or remove whatever you want. unlike Windows or macOS, you can replace or remove every single piece of the system.
I'm not that guy, but snaps are the main reason for not liking Ubuntu recently. The impression I get is that Canonical is trying to monetize Ubuntu's popularity and a lot of people are resentful of that since Ubuntu gets most of it's value from the free software it bundles into it's distro.
The list of Ubuntu "sins" is very long, and goes all the way to their founding - effectively forking the Debian ecosystem. As for being "dev friendly", it really depends on what you mean by that; their insistence on building their own things and discounting third-party input, over and over, was anything but friendly.
The company and project were founded by a Debian user and developer, who employed and still employs a number of Debian developers, to make a version of Debian for ordinary people.
How is that a bad thing?
Ubuntu changes feed back into Debian. Debian now has the `apt` command instead of `aptitude`. It has the Ubuntu GUI tool for configuring repositories and so on. It has various bits of Ubuntu.
ISTM that this was as friendly and cooperative as a sub-project can be, and Debian has benefitted significantly from it.
I tried Debian before Ubuntu. It was hard and I didn't use it because it was too hard for me to bother.
(I used Caldera OpenLinux and then later SUSE.)
Nowadays Debian is a lot better and easier, and I reckon a lot of that is down to the Ubuntu influence.
But seriously: Shuttleworth tried a classic EEE play on Debian, over and over and over. Obviously nerds mostly want to get along and will end up talking to each other, but it doesn't change the fact that, at the time, it was a (not-that-) thinly veiled, well-funded takeover attempt on the Debian ecosystem and community.
> Ubuntu changes feed back into Debian. Debian now has the `apt` command
It's nice that you bring up a classic case of unashamed namesquatting. People have been referring to "apt" in general terms since apt-get came on the scenes, 6 YEARS before Canonical was founded. But why give up the chance to piggyback on someone else's brand, eh...? So when the time came to churn on the umpteen apt-get frontend, they did just that.
OK. It definitely looks like you are someone who won't be reasoned with on this.
APT as a set of tools is ancient. `apt` as a command isn't. It is handy, it's simpler and easier, it eliminates the nonsensical split between apt-get and apt-cache and aptitude and so on... and you can tell, because Debian adopted it.
I like it. I use it all the time. The upstream project adopted it, but to you, that's bad, because it falsifies your angry claim.
how do you expect it to boot? At least linux keeps windows as an option, try installing windows after linux and you will be left without a way to boot it
It would install its bootloader into its own partition and then it would be up to you to direct your boot sequence to look there. I just did this 2 hours ago with opensuse.
Depends on what kind of user it is. My BIOS can select the disk that will be first tried for boot, and within that which partition has priority. I can select this during boot without setting it in the bios too. Another option is to use one of the boot disk on usb drive solutions. There are even alternative boot loaders (not windows or grub) that can search the disk for ALL bootable partitions.
Windows bootloader is at the mbr of the first disk. You have opensuse install its bootloader into its own disk. I am not sure if UEFI changes things here but if anything it probably makes things easier.
Both NTLDR and Windows Boot Manager are capable of redirecting to subsequent bootloaders, this feature is intended for dual booting with older versions of Windows but can also be used to dual boot into Linux and other operating systems.
As an example, if you install Windows 98, then Windows XP, then Windows 10 side by side, the following things happen:
1. Windows 98 installs its bootloader.
2. Windows XP takes a dump of 98's bootloader into a file and then overwrites the MBR with NTLDR. NTLDR is then configured with an option to chainload into 98's bootloader by reading its dump file.
3. Windows 10 takes a dump of NTLDR into a file and then overwrites the MBR with Windows Boot Manager. Windows Boot Manager is then configured with an option to chainload into NTLDR by reading its dump file.
This means you can install Windows 10 (and Windows Boot Manager), install Linux and have it install its bootloader (eg: GRUB) somewhere, then configure Windows Boot Manager to chainload the Linux bootloader (eg: GRUB) by reading from wherever it's stored.
Windows only cares for other installations of Windows, it doesn't care about anything else. For Linux installations, you need to do all the proper preparation work prior to installing Windows.
That being said, as I wrote in a comment[1] further down both NTLDR and Windows Boot Manager are capable of chainloading into other bootloaders, including Linux bootloaders like GRUB.
By selecting the Ubuntu drive I installed linux in the Bios and then that would let me boot either windows or Ubuntu. Which is what it's supposed to do.
Happy to hear they are making progress!
Lomiri was my favourite UI on the PinePhone already last year, but unfortunately WiFi issues made it unusable as a daily driver.
I was one of the relatively early adopters in 2015 when the BQ Aquaris E4.5 came out.
I gave Ubuntu Touch a chance, particularly as I was longing for something comparable to Maemo on the Nokia N900. At first it was great. OpenSSH, bash, etc. I had some fun hacking on it. However, I quickly realized they threw a beta product at the people.
I missed phone calls because of race conditions. I couldn't connect to my wifi because my password was too long.... It overall really seemed the team at Canonical didn't have enough man power.
Eventually, these things got fixed, but too late for me. In some ways it's cool that the community hasn't given up on Ubuntu touch, unlike Canonical. I don't know how much has changed under the hood, but one can only hope the software stack is more reliable now.
I also was an early adopter of the BQ Aquaris (I even meant to get a tablet, but got too busy), and it was great, Ubuntu Touch felt so much nicer for me to use than Android... and then I stupidly dropped it, and with the bottom left of the screen unresponsive I had to toss it.
Here's a YouTube video showing off the UI 3 months ago https://youtu.be/qmlabKbpTGM&t=5m44s it shouldn't be much different than Focal, but if someone has a video of the Focal UI, please post it. They should make it a lot easier to see the UI
While not a daily driver, I have been running Focal on a Pinephone Pro for a few weeks now. It is beta, things are not working. The Kali Nethunter pro for the phone arguably works better.
But the UI of Ubuntu Touch is really nice. I don't even daily driver the thing and when I pull out my android phone, I am trying to do some the of the UT swipe gestures because they are so natural.
What kind of a bubble do the Ubuntu devs live in if they dont see a reason to show even a single screenshot of their product? What goes through the head of the product manager writing a whole essay and a full extensive changelog but not bothering to add a fucking picture?
To be fair to these particular Ubuntu devs, Touch is now a community effort. Canonical abandoned it in 2017.
Which was always a letdown for me. Loading Ubuntu via a LiveCD onto the family computer to circumvent NetNanny was one of the first "hacker" things I ever did. I was really excited at the prospect of having Ubuntu on a phone.
Maybe I'll pick up a 3a just to tinker with this...
If you have a Pixel 6, why would you run anything other than GrapheneOS?
Using a community-maintained port of an abandoned Canonical project would be nice to experiment with, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as usable, reliable, secure and future-proof as Graphene.
I have no faith in Canonical and am moving off Ubuntu desktop. Never tried Touch (though the whole Unity/mobile flavour was already off-putting) and don't intend to.
It's also a weird headline, wouldn't users choose iPhones then?
I like choice and innovation a lot.
My "spare" / "retired" cellphones are now,
after distributing several to people in need,
is now too old to run this.
If I were to mention some points that would be
high on my wish list:
Radical reliability.
Frequent security updates.
Rare feature updates.
Make the feature set solid to begin with, .
There are only so many tasks that are critical on a phone
A UI Insane speed and responsiveness, with as much
eye candy removed as possible.
An email client and SMS messenger modelled after
the classic Blackberry OS.
I have never even come close to the speed
and convenience of Blackberry for email and SMS
Esp. with dedicated hardware buttons.
(Note this was long before Blackberry on Android
or Blackberry Touch.
BB was never going to catch up with the iPhone to
be an iPhone copy and they should not have tried.)
Note: This was in their classic days.
I loved it so much I tried hard for a while to start
a company producing a copy.
Hardware costs kept that from ever going anywhere.
(Which I sort of knew but wanted a proper real life change)
Then pivoting to Android to make an app that was plugged
in at a low enough level to achieve the desired features
Ideally combined with a small dock keyboard that attached
to te bottom of the phone where the powerplug is.
Then a different company made such a dock so we were in talks
with them. It proved impossible to get the dock keyboard
stable enough for our needs.
Eventually we gave up on the Android version.
It felt like we were spending far too much time
fighting Android instead of developer our goal
the email/SMS app.
I hope someone else can eventually succeed in this
but I think the market for it is small. :(
I have a couple of the Planet phones with build in Keyboard.
One a "copy" of the Psion5l
But again Android is far too dominant in day to day use.
72 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadI don't think I have the time or energy to work out how to bootstrap, port, and maintain an Android distro for my phone. Conversely, the rest of my systems run off mainline GNU/Linux, which I am able to set up and maintain. I'd be happy if I could get a phone with a similar experience.
But that Treble technology is actually being used by ubports which does Ubuntu Touch using Android drivers, and porting Ubuntu Touch on any modern Android smartphones is quite easy nowadays (assuming you have kernel source code available). It pretty much just requires rebuilding kernel source code with different parameters and that's it.
FTFY
Just get Beeper and a Linux Matrix Client and you can communicate with iMessage, Telegram and WhatsApp users without having an Android phone
My bank account works in the Browser
Sounds like pure hell on mobile.
Also, not everyone is willing to use fingerprints, so there's that too.
Willing or unwilling is per person and bit different question which is out of my interest for now.
Tap and pay or paywave are the best thing to happen in mobile IMO. I don't even carry a wallet anymore. I had having to carry a phone and wallet. Now it's back down to only have to carry one thing. Perfect
That is a lot of faith in the technology. You don't worry about a dead battery? Cracked screen? Phone getting stolen out of your hand in the subway?
> unsecure
How is security defined? What is your threat model? If your threat model includes includes running random native binary blobs from random places like Android or iOS does, then yes, you can definitely consider it unsecure.
But that's NOT the target paradigm here, and if you consider it is, you're throwing away 90%+ of the GNU/Linux distributions out there. Last time I checked, running GNU/Linux on servers or desktops wasn't considered bad practice, quite the opposite.
Instead, it may be more secure than iOS, depending on your usage, because the paradigm is to install only opensource software that you actually trust.
As one example, ubuntu-minimal is the minimal meta package, but it has a sneaky dependency on ubuntu-advantage-tools
and ubuntu-advantage-tools is sort of the master phone-home system.
Maybe it's my myopia, but I feel they were easily the most dev friend years ago, and poured their life and money into it, to benefit others
But then after ubuntu phone, the level of ingratitude from us devs were shocking
Project focus wasn't always on the ball, but we the community ripped them apart for it
So yeah, snaps is a little more lookin' after number one. I agree with that assessment, but I hardly blame them
> effectively forking the Debian ecosystem
The company and project were founded by a Debian user and developer, who employed and still employs a number of Debian developers, to make a version of Debian for ordinary people.
How is that a bad thing?
Ubuntu changes feed back into Debian. Debian now has the `apt` command instead of `aptitude`. It has the Ubuntu GUI tool for configuring repositories and so on. It has various bits of Ubuntu.
ISTM that this was as friendly and cooperative as a sub-project can be, and Debian has benefitted significantly from it.
I tried Debian before Ubuntu. It was hard and I didn't use it because it was too hard for me to bother.
(I used Caldera OpenLinux and then later SUSE.)
Nowadays Debian is a lot better and easier, and I reckon a lot of that is down to the Ubuntu influence.
I find it hard to see that as a bad thing.
But seriously: Shuttleworth tried a classic EEE play on Debian, over and over and over. Obviously nerds mostly want to get along and will end up talking to each other, but it doesn't change the fact that, at the time, it was a (not-that-) thinly veiled, well-funded takeover attempt on the Debian ecosystem and community.
> Ubuntu changes feed back into Debian. Debian now has the `apt` command
It's nice that you bring up a classic case of unashamed namesquatting. People have been referring to "apt" in general terms since apt-get came on the scenes, 6 YEARS before Canonical was founded. But why give up the chance to piggyback on someone else's brand, eh...? So when the time came to churn on the umpteen apt-get frontend, they did just that.
APT as a set of tools is ancient. `apt` as a command isn't. It is handy, it's simpler and easier, it eliminates the nonsensical split between apt-get and apt-cache and aptitude and so on... and you can tell, because Debian adopted it.
I like it. I use it all the time. The upstream project adopted it, but to you, that's bad, because it falsifies your angry claim.
Yeah, no. End of thread.
As an example, if you install Windows 98, then Windows XP, then Windows 10 side by side, the following things happen:
1. Windows 98 installs its bootloader.
2. Windows XP takes a dump of 98's bootloader into a file and then overwrites the MBR with NTLDR. NTLDR is then configured with an option to chainload into 98's bootloader by reading its dump file.
3. Windows 10 takes a dump of NTLDR into a file and then overwrites the MBR with Windows Boot Manager. Windows Boot Manager is then configured with an option to chainload into NTLDR by reading its dump file.
This means you can install Windows 10 (and Windows Boot Manager), install Linux and have it install its bootloader (eg: GRUB) somewhere, then configure Windows Boot Manager to chainload the Linux bootloader (eg: GRUB) by reading from wherever it's stored.
That being said, as I wrote in a comment[1] further down both NTLDR and Windows Boot Manager are capable of chainloading into other bootloaders, including Linux bootloaders like GRUB.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35380297
https://youtu.be/qmlabKbpTGM&t=5m44s
Not this exact version but it should be close. Much better than what I was expecting
I gave Ubuntu Touch a chance, particularly as I was longing for something comparable to Maemo on the Nokia N900. At first it was great. OpenSSH, bash, etc. I had some fun hacking on it. However, I quickly realized they threw a beta product at the people.
I missed phone calls because of race conditions. I couldn't connect to my wifi because my password was too long.... It overall really seemed the team at Canonical didn't have enough man power.
Eventually, these things got fixed, but too late for me. In some ways it's cool that the community hasn't given up on Ubuntu touch, unlike Canonical. I don't know how much has changed under the hood, but one can only hope the software stack is more reliable now.
Most painful loss of a device I've suffered.
Edit: this one is good too https://youtu.be/ltxj8YBoTMU
But the UI of Ubuntu Touch is really nice. I don't even daily driver the thing and when I pull out my android phone, I am trying to do some the of the UT swipe gestures because they are so natural.
I hope this community continues to thrive!
Which was always a letdown for me. Loading Ubuntu via a LiveCD onto the family computer to circumvent NetNanny was one of the first "hacker" things I ever did. I was really excited at the prospect of having Ubuntu on a phone.
Maybe I'll pick up a 3a just to tinker with this...
Great artists steal.
Torvalds, Stallman, Gosling, they don't steal, they innovate.
Using a community-maintained port of an abandoned Canonical project would be nice to experiment with, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as usable, reliable, secure and future-proof as Graphene.
It's also a weird headline, wouldn't users choose iPhones then?
It could be anything else, but it had to be Ubuntu.
If I were to mention some points that would be high on my wish list:
Radical reliability.
Frequent security updates.
Rare feature updates. Make the feature set solid to begin with, . There are only so many tasks that are critical on a phone
A UI Insane speed and responsiveness, with as much eye candy removed as possible.
An email client and SMS messenger modelled after the classic Blackberry OS. I have never even come close to the speed and convenience of Blackberry for email and SMS Esp. with dedicated hardware buttons.
(Note this was long before Blackberry on Android or Blackberry Touch. BB was never going to catch up with the iPhone to be an iPhone copy and they should not have tried.)
Note: This was in their classic days.
I loved it so much I tried hard for a while to start a company producing a copy. Hardware costs kept that from ever going anywhere. (Which I sort of knew but wanted a proper real life change)
Then pivoting to Android to make an app that was plugged in at a low enough level to achieve the desired features Ideally combined with a small dock keyboard that attached to te bottom of the phone where the powerplug is.
Then a different company made such a dock so we were in talks with them. It proved impossible to get the dock keyboard stable enough for our needs.
Eventually we gave up on the Android version. It felt like we were spending far too much time fighting Android instead of developer our goal the email/SMS app.
I hope someone else can eventually succeed in this but I think the market for it is small. :(
I have a couple of the Planet phones with build in Keyboard. One a "copy" of the Psion5l But again Android is far too dominant in day to day use.