Samtime tries out a Fairphone 4 running Ubuntu Touch and it seemed pretty fine. Noted issues were the second camera not working, GPS/Map app being a bit weird, and imo, the screen showing all the apps you have open is terrible. But with the reg app store and waydroid, I think it could be almost managable to use.
My mom is a battery life fiend though, so that part she won’t let go of. What’s your thoughts?
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they’re using a fairphone 4, not a 6, but honestly I’m impressed things like calling and the camera seemed to work so seamlessly? I’m tempted to pick up one of these older android phones to poke around at. I think one of the mobile linux projects publishes a compatibility matrix somewhere.
I’d love to try a pinephone pro if they still produced them 😔
I have both pinephones and I don’t love either…
but I do love their e-ink notepad and SBCs and pinetime etc. basically everything, just not the phone.
Haha yeah I’ve heard that they aren’t great, though most of the input I’ve seen is focused on the original rather than the pro. suppose I may be better served with some older compatible android phone after all.
also happily using the pine time, along with the pinecil v2. I’ve thought about the e-ink display and I’m glad that’s serving you well.
The pro is the ever slightest bump up in specs…
That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time … I remember being all about the pinewatch one fore smart watches were a thing
+1 for Pine Note!
I have a OnePlus Nord N10 5G I picked up to play with Ubuntu Touch.
Now that VoLTE works I can actually make and receive calls which makes it nearly usable.
I wish RCS could work but that may be out of their hands. Group texts (MMS) don’t work either unfortunately.
It’s close to usable but still not ready for me personally.
I did contribute to Ubuntu Touch though by adding Colemak keyboard layout support and they accepted my pull request :D
Just watched this a little while ago and was pretty impressed overall.
I agree the “all open apps” view is awful. The Vista callout made me laugh out loud.
With this and Motorola working with Graphene, we seem to be moving steadily towards some decent options for phones that aren’t Google or Apple
Graphene still requires Android though.
The existence of Graphene obviously tells me that Android is a honeypot, otherwise a trillion dollar company like Google would also harden allocation and memory safety in Android.
I bought one way back in 2015. A BQ Aquaris E5, quite decent hardware, factory-installed with Ubuntu Touch. It was an absolute disaster: buggy as hell, even the most basic native apps (SMS etc) hardly worked. Obviously no way to run Android apps. Somehow I made it work for about 3 months before giving up and flashing a CyanogenMod ROM.
There was one silver lining. At one point during those 3 months I managed to lose the phone in a (completely anonymous) taxi. The interface was obviously so weird and crappy that the taxi driver actually replied to my SMS and returned the thing to me.
Any decade now it will be ready!
You do know those were only Chinese low budget phones rebranded in Spain, right?
Since I owned and used it for a year or two, yes, I did probably know one or two things about it. Better just to make your point if you have one to make.
I really wish Sailfish would offer their OS for a wider range of devices, that OS seem the closest to ready for everyday people to use. Sailfish is great for power users as well!
Unfortunately many parts of Sailfish are proprietary though.
Yeah, but, given how they actually respect your privacy over something like Google…I am hard pressed to be overly concerned about it. Cautious, naturally because some code cannot be reviewed by the public or devs.
Is there a Fedora Touch or similar?
Sorta https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mobility
Mobile-specific distros like PostmarketOS function much better in general at the moment.
