Have you folks heard of Ubuntu Touch? It's an alternative operating system for a smartphone. It's FOSS, and advertised as having a complete Linux distro that also handles calls and texts. I don't actually use the "phone" side of my smartphone much (I don't call or text much), but rather I try to treat it as what it technically is: a portable computer that fits into your pocked. Problem is, Android and iPhone OS's are not full-on computer operating systems. There's hacks to make them seem like it, like using Termux, but that's basically just emulation, not an actual OS in your pocket. Why can't we have that, are we living in the future or aren't we?!? Smartphones now are productivity killers, designed to waste the user's time on social media apps, but technically speaking, the average smartphone's processing power, battery life, I/O, could easily run a full lightweight operating system. And the form factor is undeniably good, a computer that fits in your pocket? That would have been unheard of 30 years ago. They just don't make that type of thing, manufacturers have no interest in making that product available to the public. Don't get me started on the downgrade from BlackBerry, please bring back physical keyboards that don't cut off half of your screen!
So when I heard and learned more about Ubuntu Touch, I got pretty excited. I read a lot of reviews, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and the consensus seemed to be that while its "phone" features are a bit hit-or-miss (sporadic call quality, lost MMS messages, cell signal eats battery life too quickly), everybody said that it's still a full Linux distro under the hood. That's what I wanted, I had no interest in the phone side of it, I just want a smart-not-phone that's pocket sized. I waited until I found a Pixel 3A XL (one of the best-supported devices for Ubuntu Touch) from my local classifieds for $20, because I didn't want to invest too much in something I wasn't sure about yet (forshadowing!). The guides online are pretty straigtforward, it wasn't too hard to downgrade the device to Android 9, install UB-ports-installer on your computer, and flash Ubuntu Touch to the phone. The GUI was honestly pretty nice and usable, felt really clean and fresh, and it wasn't hard to learn the different gestures and inputs necessary. I didn't bother even installing a SIM card, so I can't report on the cell signal or anything like that, I wasn't intending to use it at a phone ever. Their app store is still quite sparse, but again, I didn't mind, I wanted terminal tools and the like. The apps they do have work well, and there's several third-party apps for things like Facebook, YouTube and Gmail. There's a built in terminal app, works ok, but as I complained about earlier, when you want to type, the on-screen keyboard pops up and covers half the console. You also have to dig through 2 or 3 different menu options on the keyboard to get what I consider to be basic keys for terminal use, like Ctrl, Alt, _, |, even arrow keys. Makes it pretty clunky.
I started diving in under the hood to get it running as a legit Linux computer in my pocket, and that's when the disappointments started piling up. First, I learned that Ubuntu Touch's entire root partition is read-only. WTF? The home folder is rw, but everything else is read-only. It's entirely possible to remount root as rw (not recommended according to the forums), but it resets to read-only after every reboot. Second, the disk is oddly partitioned by the UB-ports-installer and the root partition is only 2GB. Mean, even when you remount root to rw, there's only so much you can do with it, 2GB is tiny. You could use system links to the home partition for more space, but that's just a bandaid, and you'd have to do it for too many systems and you'll lose tracks of what goes where.
You're also not supposed to use apt or any other package managers. You can, once you set it to rw. But within a day, /var and /etc filled up the 2GB partition (I didn't realize the partition size was so small until that happened, I kept getting "no space left on disk" errors which didn't make sense with my 64GB phone). If you do use a rewritable disk, you can't upgrade or update your system, because the default upgrade would almost certainly be incompatible with Ubuntu Touch, and it'd probably brick your device. That's fine, I guess, but being unable to download or use super basic Linux tools by default kinda misses the point of calling it a "full Linux distro on your phone."
I'm unable to access my home server's SMB shares, all of my media and files that I can easily access from multiple different file managers apps on my Android phone. From the GUI, there's a file manager app that looks good on the surface, but the "Network" tab has no settings, no modification options, no way to lookup or search for a server address. From CLI or terminal, SMB and cifs.utils is disabled, even after installing them manually. If you modify /etc/fstab to mount external drives, it gets rewritten at boot. I'm trying to work around it, and asking the Ubuntu Touch forums for advice, but this is, in my opinion, a pretty basic thing you'd want to do with Linux. I'm not enough of a command line Linux expert to find a workaround on my own, and I don't know why nobody on the forums or Google searches has wanted to do this already.
Minor gripe, but I like being able to boot to console mode only on some devices, especially relatively low-powered boards like raspberry pis and old laptops. Because if you ditch the GUI and learn to use the command line, you can get a lot done with a lot less when your processor isn't trying to load graphics and a display. There's plenty of CLI/TUI tools out there for web search, Wikipedia, music players, file explorers, image processors, media managers, calenders, ebook readers, even clients for Spotify and Youtube. Unfortunately, one of the devs reached out to my inquiries regarding this, and booting/switching to tty isn't possible on Ubuntu Touch because "a framebuffer isn't implemented". Again, if I was more knowledgable I might be able to work around this myself, but I'm not, so I can't. It's not a sticking point in and of itself, but it just reinforces how much Ubuntu Touch doesn't actually feel like Linux. I'm not an experienced Linux superuser by any means, so I don't think anything I'd want to accomplish on Ubuntu Touch would be terribly complex, but apparently it is.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience. I feel like this forum is full of DIYers who can appreciate the struggles of trying to get proprietary tech to work for the user, instead of the user having to work around the tech. What do you folks think? Anybody else like me who would like a portable computer for their pocket, rather than the time-wasting app devices that we call smartphones? Closest I could find that's what I want is the Hackberry Pi on Elecrow or Tindie, I think that could be pretty great with the right setup in console mode.
So when I heard and learned more about Ubuntu Touch, I got pretty excited. I read a lot of reviews, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and the consensus seemed to be that while its "phone" features are a bit hit-or-miss (sporadic call quality, lost MMS messages, cell signal eats battery life too quickly), everybody said that it's still a full Linux distro under the hood. That's what I wanted, I had no interest in the phone side of it, I just want a smart-not-phone that's pocket sized. I waited until I found a Pixel 3A XL (one of the best-supported devices for Ubuntu Touch) from my local classifieds for $20, because I didn't want to invest too much in something I wasn't sure about yet (forshadowing!). The guides online are pretty straigtforward, it wasn't too hard to downgrade the device to Android 9, install UB-ports-installer on your computer, and flash Ubuntu Touch to the phone. The GUI was honestly pretty nice and usable, felt really clean and fresh, and it wasn't hard to learn the different gestures and inputs necessary. I didn't bother even installing a SIM card, so I can't report on the cell signal or anything like that, I wasn't intending to use it at a phone ever. Their app store is still quite sparse, but again, I didn't mind, I wanted terminal tools and the like. The apps they do have work well, and there's several third-party apps for things like Facebook, YouTube and Gmail. There's a built in terminal app, works ok, but as I complained about earlier, when you want to type, the on-screen keyboard pops up and covers half the console. You also have to dig through 2 or 3 different menu options on the keyboard to get what I consider to be basic keys for terminal use, like Ctrl, Alt, _, |, even arrow keys. Makes it pretty clunky.
I started diving in under the hood to get it running as a legit Linux computer in my pocket, and that's when the disappointments started piling up. First, I learned that Ubuntu Touch's entire root partition is read-only. WTF? The home folder is rw, but everything else is read-only. It's entirely possible to remount root as rw (not recommended according to the forums), but it resets to read-only after every reboot. Second, the disk is oddly partitioned by the UB-ports-installer and the root partition is only 2GB. Mean, even when you remount root to rw, there's only so much you can do with it, 2GB is tiny. You could use system links to the home partition for more space, but that's just a bandaid, and you'd have to do it for too many systems and you'll lose tracks of what goes where.
You're also not supposed to use apt or any other package managers. You can, once you set it to rw. But within a day, /var and /etc filled up the 2GB partition (I didn't realize the partition size was so small until that happened, I kept getting "no space left on disk" errors which didn't make sense with my 64GB phone). If you do use a rewritable disk, you can't upgrade or update your system, because the default upgrade would almost certainly be incompatible with Ubuntu Touch, and it'd probably brick your device. That's fine, I guess, but being unable to download or use super basic Linux tools by default kinda misses the point of calling it a "full Linux distro on your phone."
I'm unable to access my home server's SMB shares, all of my media and files that I can easily access from multiple different file managers apps on my Android phone. From the GUI, there's a file manager app that looks good on the surface, but the "Network" tab has no settings, no modification options, no way to lookup or search for a server address. From CLI or terminal, SMB and cifs.utils is disabled, even after installing them manually. If you modify /etc/fstab to mount external drives, it gets rewritten at boot. I'm trying to work around it, and asking the Ubuntu Touch forums for advice, but this is, in my opinion, a pretty basic thing you'd want to do with Linux. I'm not enough of a command line Linux expert to find a workaround on my own, and I don't know why nobody on the forums or Google searches has wanted to do this already.
Minor gripe, but I like being able to boot to console mode only on some devices, especially relatively low-powered boards like raspberry pis and old laptops. Because if you ditch the GUI and learn to use the command line, you can get a lot done with a lot less when your processor isn't trying to load graphics and a display. There's plenty of CLI/TUI tools out there for web search, Wikipedia, music players, file explorers, image processors, media managers, calenders, ebook readers, even clients for Spotify and Youtube. Unfortunately, one of the devs reached out to my inquiries regarding this, and booting/switching to tty isn't possible on Ubuntu Touch because "a framebuffer isn't implemented". Again, if I was more knowledgable I might be able to work around this myself, but I'm not, so I can't. It's not a sticking point in and of itself, but it just reinforces how much Ubuntu Touch doesn't actually feel like Linux. I'm not an experienced Linux superuser by any means, so I don't think anything I'd want to accomplish on Ubuntu Touch would be terribly complex, but apparently it is.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience. I feel like this forum is full of DIYers who can appreciate the struggles of trying to get proprietary tech to work for the user, instead of the user having to work around the tech. What do you folks think? Anybody else like me who would like a portable computer for their pocket, rather than the time-wasting app devices that we call smartphones? Closest I could find that's what I want is the Hackberry Pi on Elecrow or Tindie, I think that could be pretty great with the right setup in console mode.
