Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 Released - Still Based On Ubuntu 16.04, Adds Support For FM Radios

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 Released - Still Based On Ubuntu 16.04, Adds Support For FM Radios

Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is out today as the newest Ubuntu mobile operating system update for smartphones from the folks at UBports that continues maintaining the code-base left by Canonical and now pushing ahead in their own direction...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Touch-OTA-23

[Alexmitter]

In my opinion, Ubuntu Touch and Lomiri are basically dead. They were designed to run in a very custom Ubuntu Userland with all the back then Fancy Ubuntu Projects as Mir and Click, and on top of a regular android kernel and its stack.

They now spend so much time bending this old legacy canonical code towards established technologies only able to run on Mainline Devices while still maintaining compatibility with those old android devices.

KDE Mobile does KDE things and Phosh progresses fast towards a polished state, Mainline capable devices like the Pinephone(Pro) or devices with the Snapdragon 845 which can run a proper nearly mainline kernel.

For people who want to run GNU/Linux on their phone, Ubuntu Touch is inadequate and for people who want something like Android but less googly its too bad and unpolished.

[ddriver]

I'd rather see efforts to support hardware better rather than a mediocre gui shell.

[ElectricPrism]

This is a good example of why rolling release foundation isn't so bad after all.

Freezing the base and calling it "stable" is an illusion.

Ubuntu would be better off following Fedora Silver blue and making a immutable filesystem with micro updates and fallback to "last-known-good" on fail.

It'sunfortunate ubports has to carry the Ubuntu baggage. They're not half bad, still Alpine is my current favorite.

[CochainComplex]

Its strange how many xiaomi devices are listed here. In my opinion OpenSource and pure Chinese brands with potential backdoors on hardware side are not going well along. In my opinion Fairphone might be best paired with open source. Its works quite well with /e/Os.

[Old Nobody]

Its strange how many xiaomi devices are listed here. In my opinion OpenSource and pure Chinese brands with potential backdoors on hardware side are not going well along. In my opinion Fairphone might be best paired with open source. Its works quite well with /e/Os.

Ha! We Europeans usually have to deal with some Chinese hardware backdoors plus ubiquitous Five Eyes espionage as well. Best of both worlds!

[Ironmask]

This is a good example of why rolling release foundation isn't so bad after all.

Freezing the base and calling it "stable" is an illusion.

Ubuntu would be better off following Fedora Silver blue and making a immutable filesystem with micro updates and fallback to "last-known-good" on fail.

It'sunfortunate ubports has to carry the Ubuntu baggage. They're not half bad, still Alpine is my current favorite.

I didn't know about Silverblue, that's fantastic, I might check it out.

Stuff like Silverblue and NixOS just make the old Debian model seem so hopelessly archaic and error prone. We need to stop letting package managers break the entire OS just because one little thing goes wrong, this is why Linux is notorious for having the stability of Windows 95. Ubuntu dying is fantastic, it absolutely should not be the face of Linux, Linux is so much more than this ancient shoddy hobbyist ball of mud from the 90s.

[Baguy]

Ubuntu Touch is dead. Without VoLTE support and with a very limited subset of devices, it is not going to go far in the modern age. Not to mention it's still stuck on a very old Ubuntu base, and still requires Halium with an old kernel and android version, which is highly insecure. For example, the Nexus 5 port still relies on an ancient Linux 3 based android kernel that was released by the Cyanogenmod project (looooonnnnggg dead)!

They could focus on modern mainline devices like the Librem 5 and PinePhone + PinePhone Pro, which work pretty well minus a few issues, and have VoLTE as part of their modems, which means it doesn't need to figure it out in software... But their development efforts are spread so thin that they've abandoned mainline devices. What does that mean? Well, it means they are triple dog screwed.

[partcyborg]

I didn't know about Silverblue, that's fantastic, I might check it out.

Stuff like Silverblue and NixOS just make the old Debian model seem so hopelessly archaic and error prone. We need to stop letting package managers break the entire OS just because one little thing goes wrong, this is why Linux is notorious for having the stability of Windows 95. Ubuntu dying is fantastic, it absolutely should not be the face of Linux, Linux is so much more than this ancient shoddy hobbyist ball of mud from the 90s.

You repeat this in every thread about package managers but it still isn't close to reality. It's literally impossible for apt/dpkg to "break your whole system" unless you are explicitly mucking about with conflicting package sources or trying to build a frankendebian (look it up).

Also, you must not have ever actually used windows 95 as I could barely go 3 weeks without things unexpectedly getting so slow I had to format/reinstall. Not only is it not possible to break a debian distro this bad, even if you could it wouldn't happen with 3 weeks of normal use.

[direc85]

The kernel version isn't controlled by the Ubuntu Touch folks, but the available binary packages. If the manufacturer doesn't release a new kernel+firmware binary, and the drivers and firmware aren't upstreamed, you're out of luck.

And even if they did, the effort to make it work resembles the hassle of porting it to a new device altogether. Even minor binary updates can change the device tree and add/remove the need of some quirks (and Android binary drivers are notoriously buggy). That's why e.g. Sailfish doesn't update to newer kernel versions, even if major; it's just propotionally too much work.

The current mobile device sustainability is so completely at the mercy of the manufacturer it makes me sick. I'm happy that I can slap a Linux to almost any PC and it just works!