[HN Gopher] Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu To...
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Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out
Author : lproven
Score : 93 points
Date : 2023-03-30 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| danjoredd wrote:
| If they could release a version for the Pixel 6 I will install it
| and make it my main mobile OS, Shame the latest they support is
| the Pixel 3a
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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?
| Georgelemental wrote:
| This is not an official Canonical project.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| 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.
| crtxcr wrote:
| 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.
| tmtvl wrote:
| 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.
|
| Most painful loss of a device I've suffered.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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.
| williamvds wrote:
| 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.
| phh wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| And do so almost regardless of the specific device-model that
| you have...
| nabakin wrote:
| 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
|
| Edit: this one is good too https://youtu.be/ltxj8YBoTMU
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| charlesrocket wrote:
| Had enough of linux.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| 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.
| thow_away_34564 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I hope this community continues to thrive!
| teucris wrote:
| 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.
| adql wrote:
| Nah, just seeing Ubuntu does it makes me want to not touch it.
| wankle wrote:
| It's the only thing that makes me consider installing it.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Why don't you like Ubuntu? Because of the Amazon store thing?
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Not OP, but they deleted the boot loader of when windows
| drive when I installed Ubuntu on a different drive... not
| cool, Cannonical.
| nunodonato wrote:
| 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
| dizhn wrote:
| 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.
| nunodonato wrote:
| how does a non-technical user direct its boot loader to
| boot from a partition?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| A non-technical user does not mess around with partitions
| :)
| dizhn wrote:
| 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.
| csdvrx wrote:
| efibootmgr
| bmacho wrote:
| While windows had its things in the bootloader, how could
| opensuse take over the boot, without touching it?
| datkam wrote:
| Also snaps.. I haven't used Ubuntu in years. I used Manjaro
| for a while and now Arch for a couple of years.
| m463 wrote:
| I think canonical has taken control from users to its own
| benefit.
|
| 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.
| bguebert wrote:
| 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.
| tsegratis wrote:
| I think you're right, but
|
| 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
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| While the project was started by Canonical, they've since
| cancelled it and UBports, a group of volunteers, have taken
| over.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| 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.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| But it's still Ubuntu.
| nabakin wrote:
| https://youtu.be/ltxj8YBoTMU
|
| https://youtu.be/qmlabKbpTGM&t=5m44s
|
| Not this exact version but it should be close. Much better than
| what I was expecting
| dtx1 wrote:
| > 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, ...
|
| FTFY
| phh wrote:
| 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.
| hdhrufjdi wrote:
| You don't need an Android phone for messengers.
|
| 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
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Bank App, NFC bank card payments?
|
| 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
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I don't even carry a wallet anymore.
|
| 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?
| pleb_nz wrote:
| 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.
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| adql wrote:
| I don't trust phone security enough to do that.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| It's the same as having a credit card for web orders that
| has a lower limit, you load the same card into the
| phone...
| clircle wrote:
| > My bank account works in the Browser
|
| Sounds like pure hell on mobile.
| hdhrufjdi wrote:
| It isn't though. What fits into a app screen of a phone
| also fits into a browser screen on a phone
| CoolCold wrote:
| 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?
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| slowmotiony wrote:
| 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?
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It's because Ubuntu Touch is actually meant to be used from the
| command line.
| geraldhh wrote:
| tbh the screenshot probably wouldn't tell much anyways, but
| have my upvote
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| 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...
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I really want to like linux but every dang distro i've tried is
| 3 feet from gold. It's like the final steps are never taken.
|
| Great artists steal.
| wankle wrote:
| Gates and Jobs are why I don't use Windows or Mac.
|
| Torvalds, Stallman, Gosling, they don't steal, they innovate.
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(page generated 2023-03-30 23:01 UTC)