Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Touch-OTA-1-Focal

[varikonniemi]

It's just unfathomable why they work on 20.04 that will be EOL in 2 years, when 22.04 has been out for a year.

[dreamcat4]

well it seems there are a few alternatives, for example mobian (debian based) and postmarketOS (alpine based)

however what i would also like to see is better smartphones support ontop of a base of void linux too. as another option. because: reasons

[stormcrow]

It's just unfathomable why they work on 20.04 that will be EOL in 2 years, when 22.04 has been out for a year.

It's an unfathomable amount of work that goes into a mainstream distribution even one where most of the work is borne by a parent organization, let alone one that targets a very niche market that's further hobbled by access to functional drivers and a lack of open source compatible GPUs and cell modems. Nearly everyone using a cell phone that wants a 3rd party ROM is going to use Android, not a stock Linux distro.

Edit to add: If this were easy and didn't need massive effort and time, Pine Phone and Purism wouldn't be having a bit of trouble getting usable products out the door. You can't just build a kernel, drop it into the software image and call it a day.

[padraic7a]

It's just unfathomable why they work on 20.04 that will be EOL in 2 years, when 22.04 has been out for a year.

End of Life for 20.04 will be 2030. So that's a lot of time to move. The project estimate that 20.04 to 22.04 and beyond shouldn't be as difficult as the most recent move, which included switching from upstart to systemd.

[Vistaus]

It's just unfathomable why they work on 20.04 that will be EOL in 2 years, when 22.04 has been out for a year.

Because they started working on 20.04 a long time ago and upgrading to 22.04 will be less work. But aside from that, they have been granted LTR support, so even the 20.04 version won't be EOL for UBports until 2030.

[ServerGarbage]

I find sad that even if the OS was totally usable thae lack of apps makes it little more than a Linux toy. I say this as a pinephone owner that likes to test how are the things going every few months.

[equareo]

I find sad that even if the OS was totally usable thae lack of apps makes it little more than a Linux toy. I say this as a pinephone owner that likes to test how are the things going every few months.

As a Pinephone and Fairphone 4 owner i must tell you that the difference is night and day. I've been daily driving 20.04 Ubuntu touch on the FP4 for 3 months now and it's very fast, stable, has push notifications and a battery that last the whole day. The lack of apps is a problem, but most android apps can be used through waydroid.

[Flaburgan]

I encourage everyone to read the blogpost, there is more in it that what is listed here, especially, many Waydroid improvements, and more to come. I used Ubuntu Touch on my primary device for two years but I had to switch back to Android with /e/ OS (https://e.foundation by Slackware creator Gael Duval) just because I missed Signal too much. It's a shame...

[equareo]

I had to switch back to Android with /e/ OS (https://e.foundation by Slackware creator Gael Duval) just because I missed Signal too much. It's a shame...

You can run signal through waydroid. You can also use Axolotl, but i think it breaks occasionally. Personally i use a matrix bridge to relay messages to the native app Cinny. You can host it yourself on a server or use a paid service like "element one". None of the solutions are ideal, but it's a workaround i can live with for now.