DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review | Hacker News Reader

DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

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138 pointsashitlerferad91 comments

I got the BQ Aquarius 5 a few months ago, after my Moto G2 SIM card stopped working. So when comparing two budget-but-capable-phones, I can say that the hardware on the Ubuntu phone is not the problem.

The software they have is great, and I haven't seen any half-backed features. The updates are consistent and always bring something interesting. The idea of lenses and scopes are great as an alternative to the lack of common apps. I didn't miss not having a weather app or yelp, or youtube or whatever.

The one thing that is lacking on Ubuntu Touch are the things that are core to mobile use cases. For example:

- I understand that I won't get a decent Google Maps app, but there is no real alternative. Here Maps comes installed, but I could not find a way to get public transportation data. uNav seems to do the turn-by-turn navigation, but they don't have voice, which is useless when I am on a bike.

- There is no decent story for messaging/VoIP: You can have Telegram, but also is just a webview wrapper. Messenger, Whatsapp? Nothing. And if at least they had half-decent XMPP/SIP clients, I could try to drop the closed services and try to switch my friends and family with me. But what good is a smartphone that I can't use to talk or chat?

Because of these things, I was basically forced to always be walking around with two phones: the Ubuntu one for connectivity and basic media and as a hotspot for my broken Android, which I would then use when I needed to look into maps or call/message someone. The hassle was enough for me to find a replacement board for the SIM card and go back to use only Android for everything. The Ubuntu phone now is in a drawer, waiting for me to get some time to play with application development for Ubuntu Touch.

All-in-all, my feeling is that Canonical is close to get its break and make Ubuntu a compelling alternative. It is just not there yet. I also hope that this Moto G was my last Android phone.

I can't speak for this OS but I use OsmAnd (http://osmand.net) in place of google maps on cyanogenmod and it does do a reasonable job of voice navigation (using the same OpenStreetMap data as uNav). It's open source so it should be able to work in principle.

I agree there are good applications available, but OSMAnd is an Android app, you'd need some sort of compatibility layer for it to run on stock Linux. I think there is work going on for that happen, but it's not there yet. The project I can recall is Shashlik, there are one or two others as well.

I think Android app compatibility is necessary for a Linux phone. You won't be able to use Play Services, but a lot of apps do not require that. Android compatibility would for instance give you WhatsApp. It also gives you access to hardware like activity monitors (Garmin and Withings apps don't require play services), which otherwise is very unlikely to be supported. And also sophisticated public transport apps like Moovit.

There's a (presumably unofficial) desktop port of OsmAnd (called offroad) although I don't know how stable it is/how it's implemented. I agree that a fully functional and more general compatibility layer could be rather useful.

Hopefully Google will open source the container based approach they use for enabling Android apps on Chrome OS

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/05/chrome-os-android-a...

> - There is no decent story for messaging/VoIP

I have many gripes with my Ubuntu phone, but this isn't one of them. Aside from my personal preference of opting out of Whatsapp, they do have the webapp version so you don't need to carry that Android around once registered.

They also have Signal, which works well. I SSH/tmux into a box with command line Finch (pidgin for CLI) and IRSSI when I really need to IM 'on the go' and I don't have their number for a message. Which is a rare situation.

The web version of whatsapp does not do calls, only messages. And when you have family/friends scattered around 3 continents, traditional PSTN calling is not an option.

About Signal: especially now that Whatsapp has adopt their encryption protocol, it is very hard for me to convince everyone else to switch to Signal, and AFAIK Signal does not do group messaging, so I would have to convince other people to switch to an inferior solution with no extra value to justify the tradeoff. If I had decent XMPP/SIP clients I could at least try to sell the extra value of having your communications outside of control of any single company.

Signal has group messaging.

What about linphone for VoIP.

As this is just linux under the hood, can you not just run Google maps via the browser?

> Over the past year and a half I have become accustomed to the idea that I get to run free applications on my phone in exchange for being shown semi-frequent ads. This tended not to bother me most of the time, except when Android apps would suddenly show me full screen videos at high volume.

Really? I installed AdAway [1] on my Android phone and since then I have seen no ads. Zero.

The only issue is that some legitimate apps don't work, because they pull content from sits which are blacklisted (mostly stock ticker apps). I feel that's a small price to pay for not having battery and data sucking ads during my phone experience.

Yes, it requires root to install the hosts file. That's basically a one time event (I rarely update the list and still never see ads) and the battery impact is none because the ad blocking works at DNS level (as opposed to say, a system-wide proxy)

[1] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=Adaway&fdid=...

Huh. I've just never installed any ad-based applications. If there's a no-ad paid version for a buck or two I'll buy it, otherwise, I just don't use it.

How did you know which apps have ads? Until recently it was not shown anywhere I think?

Play Store comments, magazines and web sites that review applications?

I never install anything that hasn't been reviewed.

If it's a gateway to a paid service (music stores, Uber, Lyft, etc), it generally won't have ads.

If it's free, but not a gateway to a paid service, I check to see if source is available; if source is available, it generally doesn't have ads (and if it does, I can just build it myself and remove them).

If the above checks fail, I check for a paid, ad-free version. If such a version exists, that implies the free version has ads. If the price is reasonable, I'll buy it, otherwise I'll skip it.

Finally you have free-as-in-beer but not as in freedom apps, that don't have paid alternative or any other way of generating revenue. I just assume those apps are either encrusted in ads or scams, so I don't install them.

The latest version of the play store identifies apps that show ads or have in-app purchases.

https://files.derf.us/Screenshot_20160801-105001.png

If you only download Free Software, like from F-Droid, you can be certain it won't have advertisements or other creepy features.

The Play Store is a wild west of crap though, so you have to be much more careful.

That sounds great in theory, until you pay for the no-ad version and the developer crams ads in a month or two later.

Or you can install this via debug mode and adb push and then run install from the recovery image if you can flash one.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1916098

I think at this point you're better off going network-wide blocking to cover all your devices instead of just the few empowered to provide this security themselves.

I use a self-hosted DNS server called https://pi-hole.net/ for that, it was created for Raspberry Pis but I put it into a Vagrantfile and combined it with block lists similar to Ghostery from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts to form https://github.com/benlowry/pihole-extended-hosts

A commercial solution similar to that was just all over HN too - https://optimal.com

> About 1GB of memory is required to run the phone with its default scopes and settings, leaving us about 2GB of space for applications and other features.

I did not see this coming. I was under the impression that moving away from a JVM would have lowered the memory requirements.

A comparison of the two versions of Meizu Pro 5, Android and Ubuntu, would have been useful too. I am curious if the move away from the Android architecture has changed the responsiveness of apps, or affected battery life.

According to the Verge [1] : "The most powerful Ubuntu phone is still not good enough, The Meizu Pro 5 has the Galaxy S6's processor, but not its performance"

[1] : http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11097126/meizu-pro-5-ubunt...

As of Android 5, there is only ART, which is no different than using Go, D, or any other AOT compiled language with a GC enabled runtime.

Also many Scopes are actually written in either JavaScript, or QML with C++ and Go as possible code-behind languages.

https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/phone/scopes/

So overall the runtime requirements aren't much different, unless you are writing a pure Qt/C++ scope (without QML).

Ah well, I guess I'll stay with Android for the time being then. I hope they meant to introduce Scopes as a stopgap measure to bridge the app divide to Android and iOS. I don't like this trend of newer (Android) apps needing 20-50MB downloads, and being so bloated for what they actually do.

> I don't like this trend of newer (Android) apps needing 20-50MB downloads, and being so bloated for what they actually do.

Most of those apps are actually written in Qt, PhoneGap, Xamarin, or whatever portable flavour of the month.

Applications written in Java just with the Android Frameworks, are hardly above 10MB in application code, usually the rest are image/audio resources or a collection of the "Java framework of the month" for Android.

Ubuntu Touch actually runs parts of Android in the LXC container. Maybe this is why is not very memory efficient.

https://developer.ubuntu.com/static/devportal_uploaded/13698...

AFAIK, that is just the Android HAL. I can't imagine that part using much memory.

Likewise, how on earth do you manage to make Linux use 1GB of RAM without running Java or some sort of large, memory optimised database?

JavaScript, QML and Go.

Totally agree with JavaScript, it's the new Java except that it's lowered the bar to people that otherwise couldn't write 'applications', which while thats great for learners and education - it means that you tend to get people that are great designers and good at product branding pushing poorly engineered software.

Go however, in my experience tends to be very fast and lightweight.

I don't know anything about QML so won't comment.

QML is something like XAML for UI design, but it is based on JavaScript. You can write a full application in QML if the built in widgets are good enough.

Twenty years ago we linuxheads poked fun at Irix for starting 36 daemons on a singleuser workstation. Or was it 43? Whatever the number, I guess ubuntu has caught up.

Sir, I approve of your comment :)

Ubuntu is the one distro that I wouldn't want to run on my phone, but I'd love a functioning Linux phone that's well setup and maintained, I think the real kicker for me would be able to plug it into a simple dock when I get to work and have my full desktop OS running, but first we need a distro that's more... shall we say 'sensible' or 'tested' taking on that task I think.

I wonder if it has block level encryption and SELinux enabled? I'd hope so.

There's always chroot debian and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

It's Ubuntu, so it'd be AppArmor, and I would say "I sure hope so".

I bought a OnePlus 3 for the reason that it will be a well supported Ubuntu Touch phone [0]. It allows me dip the toe into the water with Ubuntu Touch while keeping Android as a backup. The 6 GB RAM of the OnePlus3 may well prove to be useful after all ;)

[0] http://techpp.com/2016/06/17/oneplus-3-ubuntu-touch-os/

Surprised at how good this phone sounds!

Though I am not sure I have the courage to move from Android, it does sound like Ubuntu Phone could be a decent 4th player in the market now that FFOS is DOA.

I imagine you have a lot more flexibility for the software you write? Like, could I easily use Python + Tkinter to set up a quick "app" for my phone?

Basically, is this phone more of a small computer with Ubuntu, or a different beast?

I keep hearing it's supposed to be pretty much stock ubuntu with a slick front-end and phone drivers. I haven't been able to try it yet though. I hope it is, because I've been dying to get an actual linux phone for a long time. Unfortunately this review was a little skimpy on what went on underneath the hood.

It's not quite stock Ubuntu in the sense that the core system is read only, in order to allow for OTA updates. So at present you can only apt-get by going into a dev mode which means you can't get the OTA's.

It's out of stock anyway with no plan for new ones to get sold

I hope the ubuntu phone fulfills the promise that FirefoxOS had. FFOS was killed due to a spiral of very low spec hardware and no real third-party development.

Being able to hack on the phone using scripts at a moment's notice is not something any phone currently provides.

I wonder if we could put FFOS on this phone. I still think the FF model of "everything is a web page" would lead to a pretty magical end goal, first set out by Smalltalk VMs. But I am not using a phone with a laggy keyboard.

Smalltalk used "everything is native".

As someone that used Smalltalk, HTML/CSS with JavaScript glue surely isn't what Smalltalk had for its GUI.

Oh, did it? I thought it was in its own universe. Maybe I'm thinking of some other system (Scratch??).

I do miss my Nokia n900 running Maemo, this might be as close to a replacement as it'll get. Just need a phone with a good built in keyboard.

https://neo900.org/

The €480 quoted on the site covers 40% of the final price. I paid ~€130 for the Ubuntu phone and I don't intend to ever pay more than 2x that for a smartphone. But it'd have to be special. Truly converge PC/phone, then I may pay closer to PC prices.

EDIT: I had and thoroughly enjoyed my N900 for many years.

https://pyra-handheld.com/

Not really like a phone though.

Have you checked Jolla [1] with a keyboard other half ?

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-o...

Seemed lke a good idea, but unfortunately:

FAQs to which the answer is no:

    Can I order?
    Can I get TOHKBD?
    Are you sad to close the store?
    ...
    TOHKBD? Can I buy?

I'm also in the market for a high-spec smartphone with hardware keyboard but the only realy candidate was the Blackberry PRIV. However it has an encrypted bootloader with no ability to bypass, so not an option.

TOHKBDs do occasionally show up on eBay, though. It took me about two months to be able to get my hands on one.

> When I first started using the phone I noticed the Today scope showed temperatures in the weather forecast in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. This can be adjusted by changing our selected language in the device's settings panel and restarting the phone.

Really? You have to restart to change the temperature units? What a joke.

Restarting is also required for iOS when changing the language.

No, it isn't. I just did it on my iPhone 6S, and it did not require a restart.

Just checked again, it restarts all applications and everything with a GUI, but it's not a full restart.

I guess setting the locale requires all applications using it to restart to pick up the changes in their environment, just like on regular Linux/Unix systems – processes inherit the environment from their parent.

I don't know how iOS works, but it might also have to restart processes if it uses system locales for such settings.

The real issue is "You have to change your language to change the temperature units". There's no correlation between those. That is one broken scope/widget if the author is correct.

While I agree, that it should be changeable independently, there is a very strong correlation between language and temperature units.

Well, sort of. It makes sense to bundle language and display features, such as date and temperature formats, into a single locale. That's what other Unixy operating systems do.

However, a locale is a display formatting issue. If the entire system needs to be restarted after a locale change, that's a sign that display issues are too tightly coupled to stuff going on in non-display code, perhaps in kernel space, and that should not be the case.

I run Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 4, and have done for about 6 months now. It is slow and the mail client often crashes. And it doesn't have Snapchat. And the camera app is rubbish.

Apart from that, it is a lot less stressful to use than Android. I got fed up with it being slow at one point and reinstalled Android, and it had so many nag screens about reporting data to Google, and so many privacy options that I had to be sure to configure correctly, that I put Ubuntu back on it the same day.

I carry a second phone to run Snapchat and take photos.

EDIT: They do make you sign up for an account before you can download apps from the store, which completely boggles my mind. Their singular advantage over Android is that they don't hassle you for information, yet they almost throw that away by making you sign up to download apps. I just used a fake account, but I wish they didn't make you sign up.

Distrowatch is definitely looking dated nowadays. Could do with a re-design at some point or another.

it's almost unreadable on a widescreen monitor

They rank distros by popularity based on how many clicks they get, so I always viewed it as a kind of parody/entertainment website.

It is web 1.0 clicking game for linux enthusiasts. Linux Mint users have been most avid clickers for a while now it seems.

naah its fine as is.

Brazen bikeshedding.

I would like this phone because, I assume, I can inspect and change the kernel and all other OSS software on it. What I don't get is, with their focus on emerging markets, why it needs to be so expensive. If they would focus more on performance they could have one for $100. I recently bought some iPhone clone in China, and besides the software, it's a fine phone; most people who see me with it immediately want one. It was $65 and works fine for most things I use smartphones for, even, to my surprise, taking great pictures. Battery life is around 8 hours/day with quite heavy use, the GPS performance is total crap (I think this is a software issue), but for $65 this is a nice device (it feels great as it's a 6s+ ripoff casing wise). But proprietary software in as much that I can't swap out the kernel and the rip off iOS on-top-of-Android is quite painful. If someone would just equip these phones with something fully OSS (minus a few drivers possibly) I don't think I would buy anything else.

I own the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu smartphone. And I like it.

This is actually my first smartphone, so my perspective may be somewhat different from that of the reviews of it out there. I am a software engineer, and I greatly value the freedom to do whatever I want with computing devices I own, and to be able to tweak things and contribute any enhancements back to the community.

If something irks me and I can fix it, I will submit a patch (i.e., as a drive-by contributor), otherwise I will file a bug report and help reproduce the issue. Nothing major, no huge time-sink; just being able to help shape the software that surrounds us, and having a feeling of contributing to something bigger than a single corporation. So naturally I use a flavour of GNU/Linux on my computer.

I already use Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop computers (both professionally and private), so the Ubuntu smartphone seems like a good shot at getting something that can potentially near the freedom I have on desktop Linux, and thus far I am not disappointed.

A smartphone for me is a way to get information on-the-go. For things like public transport itineraries, weather forecasts, and navigation Ubuntu Touch already suffices.

The big 'issue' of course is apps. Ubuntu Touch has its own store with a growing number of free software apps, and some proprietary stuff. Most of the basic apps I expect are there, mostly pre-installed. Big name apps are missing though — there is no WhatsApp for instance. Now for my opinion on this topic, which may very well be an unpopular minority view:

To me, this lack of big name proprietary apps is just fine and exactly what I want. The term 'app' is ambiguous at best and I feel that it is a threat to software freedom. To illustrate: A simple stand-alone off-line calculator is called an 'app', but so i a web-service accessible exclusively with proprietary software like WhatsApp. That is, an 'app' in common parlance is not just the piece of software you install on your device, it is also the infrastructure backing it. In the case of the extremely popular WhatsApp, you need their software to be able to access their service. It appears to be illegal to create a free software client that can talk to their service, unlike, say, email (SMTP, IMAP, etc.). That's fine, its their service, their rules, I prefer to make due without.

I don't want a computing device filled with a bunch of proprietary clients for day-to-day tasks. If you offer a great service, offer a great web-app to use it with (I already have a capable browser installed), or (re)use or create an open protocol anyone can use. Otherwise, I'll just do without. If your business model depends on me installing a piece of proprietary software, I am not interested.

Other than that, there is still plenty of rough edges. It is not trivial (though possible) to install the normal software packages from Ubuntu's repositories, but on the other hand, I have not had the need yet. I do sorely miss Firefox with uBlock Origin though! Ads on websites seem even more intrusive than on the desktop.

If I had to summarize the threats to Ubuntu Touch's future I would say that it sometimes feels as if there are not enough core developers working on the product, but that may be just the impression I got from the issues I have reported.

Canonical seems to bet on being able to get Ubuntu Touch entrenched in developing countries, but I doubt that that strategy will pay off (although I am not knowledgeable enough on that topic to make a firm statement about this). If they can manage to make Ubuntu Touch synonymous with the easy to use and obtain free operating system for smartphones (the way Ubuntu is for desktop computers) they may have a good chance at winning the hearts of software developers with a preference for free software — that is the niche I would bet on.

The lack of apps in the way of Android and IOS is of course problematic in the current app-economy driven smartphone world, and will prevent major adoption of Ubuntu Touch for some time to come, but it may be that I am not alone in my dismissal of this reliance on proprietary apps.

> I do sorely miss Firefox with uBlock Origin though! Ads on websites seem even more intrusive than on the desktop.

You could edit the hosts-file to block ads...

Specs and pics of the hardware, if anyone else is curious: http://www.gsmarena.com/meizu_pro_5-7573.php

How does distrowatch gets the "page hits" for all the distros's websites? or are those "page hits" initiated from within distrowatch?

(surprised to see Mint at the top)

Tried Mint lately? It's been mighty fine distribution the last years.

It seems to have a poor reputation for security, though.

It does, I don't think that affects it much, though, because it's still so much less likely to catch a virus on Mint than it is on Windows, that it's still an upgrade for people switching over from Windows, which is sort of Mint's target user-base anyways.

They've also done some work on security with their latest release, mainly making kernel-updates more accessible...

Do they support upgrading yet though? If I wanted to reinstall my OS every year I'd go back to using Windows 95

You can manually edit the APT-sources to point to the new release and then let it perform a dist-upgrade, which is, as far as I understand it, the same as Ubuntu or Fedora do automatically.

The Linux Mint devs just don't think that's a good way of handling upgrades, so they don't have a button for it. You can read their reasoning here in section E : https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

Except unlike the other OSes, they don't test it.

That's why I went back to Ubuntu

Well, they support it for better or worse, you can upgrade from version 17 to 18 since they don't use systemd, on Ubuntu if you go from 14.04 to 16.04 you should do clean install.

I think they are counting how often the distro subpage on Distrowatch is accessed.

They are counting "one hit per IP address per day" on distribution subpages. Here is explained "DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking": https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Therefor it depends how well specific distro page of theirs rank in Google? If linux mint ranks 5th and Ubuntu 30th, because ubuntu is so popular, of course it gets more hits. And maybe some little known distro ranks 1st because it has no competition.

I think their popularity table is flawed, but I still love their website. You can browse distros that are based on specific distros etc.

Mint gets recommended a lot for people wanting to switch over from Windows. I'd say even more recommendations than Ubuntu, because of the more Windows-like interface.

Also just in general, Ubuntu is more well-known outside of the Linux-microcosm, so people don't need to look it up as much, and the more advanced distros like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE probably don't get looked up as much, because if you want to switch to one of those, you usually already know why you want to use them.

It seems kind of mad to think Ubuntu could succeed where Microsoft failed. I just can't see any way they will convince third party developers to write apps for it.

Well they might count on a great deal of open-source development and related good-will, not to mention they are probably already using a lot of standard libraries and applications to provide expected functionality. I wouldn't mind not having many "commercial" apps available if I could just use almost any already existing open-source application, not unlike on Linux desktop systems.

I know it doesn't look easy for Jolla and Ubuntu Phone, but I hope at least one of them prevails so we can have a reasonably open Linux system running on phones.

Few existing open source apps are touchscreen apps though. Enjoy your stylus!

Well, a few things which might help:

- There's going to be developers who will develop for Ubuntu Touch in their free time, just because they want the platform to succeed, similar to desktop Linux. And essentially no one will do that for Windows Phone, meaning that Windows Phone depends much more on developers to be able to make a profit off of it, and therefore much more on having market share to begin with.

- Ubuntu Touch appeals more to developers than Windows Phone does. And if a developer already uses a platform, it's much more likely that they write an app for it in their free time.

- Because Ubuntu Touch is open-source, it can be ported to existing phones. You can for example dual-boot it on a few of the Nexus devices already, which again, makes it easier to develop for. Also means there's another way for people to try it out.

> And essentially no one will do that for Windows Phone, meaning that Windows Phone depends much more on developers to be able to make a profit off of it, and therefore much more on having market share to begin with.

Totally incorrect. There's loads of developers making Windows Phone apps that are compatible with services that don't have an decent official app yet (See, for example, Rudy Huyn).

The thing is, it doesn't necessarily HAVE TO. I loved my Windows Phones, my wife and grandmother both have a Lumia 950 and they do everything they need to do, they don't require constant maintenance like every Android device I have supported and didn't cost a small fortune to get a device with an acceptable amount of storage (plus the camera is great, good combo for my wife). Ultimately though, the entire product is driven by Microsoft, and they maintain an Apple-like grip on their devices.

With a "proper" linux-based phone anyone (assuming the hardware isn't crazy locked down) can contribute to the success, even if it remains a niche not everyone cares about snapchat or the hippest app of the month, if I can connect to my work VPN (this is actually where I ended up switching to an iPhone, there's no AnyConnect client for Windows Phone), use an email client with Exchange support, and have a modern web browser I'm mostly set for a daily driver - sure, it's nice to be able to use Netflix, Amazon Video, PlayStation Vue on my phone, but I've got my TV, my desktop or my tablet for all of that.

See http://ubports.com/ for ports to some Android devices

If you're willing to leave vanilla Android or Apple and experiment with a new OS project, you should check out the security focused Android fork of Copperhead. https://copperhead.co/android/ Why go through all of the grief of switching without a security focused purpose?

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