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Comment by logicrook | Hacker News Reader

Linux enthusiasts have had a very bad time when wanting to try a Ubuntu phone because you had, to do so, to activate an account with a valid email address. As you may imagine these Linux users are concerned by privacy issues, so it was a definitive problem.

Other early reviews of people who could get past that were usually not good because of not-consumer-readiness and low-specs of the phone, making usage a slow torture.

I hope these early reviews should be forgotten, so wait and see.

BTW, the fact that FXOS is heavily reliant on android was revealed to me as a cruel joke: you need to use a Microsoft only program to be able to unlock your FX phone. Hooray for free software!

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Linux enthusiast here. Had a BQ E4.5 Ubuntu edition since April 2015 and I am pretty pleased with it. I love the UX.

It has come a long way already: the off the air (OTA) upgrades roughly every month make it better and better. It is more than usable. If not having Skype, WhatsApp etc.. is not a show stopper for you, then it can be a great phone for you. There are already many apps, but of course not comparable to Android. Can see an official app viewer here: https://uappexplorer.com/

Also the dev tools for it are great. The Ubuntu SDK, based on QtCreator is pretty slick. It is quite easy to write a native app. There are many guidelines and good docs for it: https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/

Happy to hear that! Could you comment on the account requirement? Is it still a thing?

To use the appstore you need an Ubuntu One account. Basically, so it can customise the experience (ie reload your apps onto a new phone) to you and lets you buy commercial applications. Most end-users want convenience and customised experiences are a good way to go. If you absolutely require privacy then using a temporary email would be a way around it.

>you need to use a Microsoft only program to be able to unlock your FX phone

Do you mean a Windows-only app? Blame the chipset manufacturer. fastboot oem unlock works just fine on any platform that runs fastboot/adb - it's up to the firmware on the phone to accept that command.

Didn't think of that, but it's true that there's an unhealthy circle between locked hardware and locked software.

Still a pretty horrible experience to read "now find a windows computer"... when trying to install free software.

Yep - what was the model of phone?

So if Canonical can do one thing, I suppose it comes down to getting more beta-testing to get the UX better?

I admit I haven't used it, but it seems like they have interesting ideas, it just fails on the delivery, not necessarily are their ideas (scopes, the whole convergence story) are flawed, they just need to do better on delivering.

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