[HugThem]

I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.

With Ubuntu Touch, you can not install anything on the phone. It has a read-only root filesystem that gets updated over the air.

So just like with the locked down phones (iOS, Android), to gain control over the filesystem, you would have to root it. But then your changes would get wiped with the next update.

This seems just as far from a "Linux Phone" as Android to me.

I am looking forward to one day having a phone that runs Linux. But then I want the same freedom I have on my laptop. To install whatever I want from the Debian repos via apt-get and update via apt-update / apt-upgrade.

[MayeulC]

Well, just so that you don't throw the baby with the bathwater...

Pinephone [0] is a platform designed by pine64 together with the community. A community that is very FLOSS-centric.

That phone has a few pieces of proprietary firmware, that's true[1] (mostly for the RF parts). But besides that, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, even write your own bootloader[2].

By default, the bootloader will try to boot from the SD card over the EMMC, so you can just slap an arbitrary system image on an SSD card to distro-hop. That's right, there are multiple distributions available: Ubuntu touch, which is indeed built like you say, but you should also have root access OOTB, and AFAIK can change every piece of the system (OTA source, system image, build your own). But also a few others like Maemo Leste (a meego spiritual successor, I think), SailfishOS, android[3], or even plain Linux distributions: PostmarketOS [4] is an Alpine-based distribution tailored to phones, but you can also run Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, Nix, and port your own.

The Lima open source graphics driver for Mali GPUs works quite well, so that helps a lot compared to other "open" phones.

A similar phone is the Purism Librem 5, that goes further with the de-blobing effort, though the price point is quite different.

[0]: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone

[1]: https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/24/setting-the-record-straigh...

[2]: https://megous.com/git/p-boot/about/

[3]: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10613

[4]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PinePhone_(pine64-...

[lupyuen]

Great points! We should document this somewhere :-)

[blihp]

Ubuntu Touch (UBports) is one approach to security, but not the only one. I have no problem with a 'locked down' OS as long as I'm the one locking it down. Ubuntu Touch locks down the phone, under your control. iOS, and to a degree Android, lock you out of your phone. Having used the Pinephone with various distros for a couple weeks now vs the various unlocked bootloader/rooted/alternate Android installs I've used over the years, I can tell you that even a 'locked down' Linux phone still feels more like 'my' device than Android ever did. For those who don't like restrictions, even self-imposed ones, UBports probably won't make a lot of sense.

That said, Mobian is working better for me than UBports right now. Theoretically, I like what UBports should be able to offer. But right now in practice Mobian has the advantage. It will be interesting to see where things stand in 6 months.

[zozbot234]

> It has a read-only root filesystem that gets updated over the air. ... you would have to root it. But then your changes would get wiped with the next update.

No, given root access you can simply overlay a separate read-write filesystem over the readonly system partition. It can be as "Linux" as any Live distribution with persistence.

[HugThem]

What are the "easy" steps to "overlay a separate read-write filesystem over the readonly system partition"? I would not even know where to start.

[lupyuen]

Just a simple line :-)

sudo mount -o remount,rw /

Then we can sudo apt install anything...

sudo apt install gcc gdb git make libgles2-mesa-dev

[panta]

This is re-mounting R/W the root, not mounting an overlay. What you install this way will be wiped out on next update.

[IronBacon]

I think something like "mount --bind olddir newdir"...

[panta]

This is a bind mount, not an overlay. For an actual overlay you need something like overlayfs or unionfs. See for example https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Overlay_filesystem

[lupyuen]

Thanks! Will try that out

[panta]

Yes, but if it wasn’t already done out of the box (no idea if it is or not!), you’d need to apply the changes to mount the overlay to the root on every update.

[lupyuen]

That's what I thought too... A locked down walled garden!

But the more I probed, the more it looked like plain Ubuntu with Wayland and AppArmor, without X11 :-)

Check out what I found: https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/wayl...

[HugThem]

That is a really long article. Looks like a lot of work.

I will wait until there is a phone where I can just open a terminal and type apt install whatever I want.

[vinay427]

I'm not as familiar with UBPorts/Ubuntu Touch, but you can do this with Debian on the PinePhone, or use other package managers like Pacman with Arch/Manjaro. I think you're conflating the phone with UBPorts, which is just the preloaded OS on one edition of the phone. There's nothing Ubuntu-specific about the PinePhone.

[solarkraft]

Most of the other distributions allow just that, this is just Ubuntu being special again.

[josteink]

> I will wait until there is a phone where I can just open a terminal and type apt install whatever I want.

This phone can boot any Linux distro you like from SD-card or usb.

That’s pretty unique and you really don’t get much more open than that.

[kop316]

Mobian on the pinephone does exactly that. There is nothing stopping someone from a) flashing the eMMC directly to a new distro or b) flashing it to an SD card to try it out.

[lupyuen]

Haha thanks for checking it out :-)

[seba_dos1]

That's just Ubuntu Touch thing, but there are other distros out there. You shouldn't think about phones like Librem 5 or PinePhone the same way as you think about "Android phones" - there's nothing that ties them inherently to a single operating system. They're rather more like a PC where you can choose your distro by yourself.

However, if you're looking for "out-of-the-box GNU/Linux experience", Librem 5 comes with PureOS, which is essentially a FSF-approved Debian. See https://puri.sm/posts/what-is-mobile-pureos/

[duncan_bayne]

That's pretty much why I abandoned Ubuntu Touch on my PinePhone, and switched to Mobian.

Feels like running a regular GNU/Linux distro, just on my phone. Much more suited to my purposes.

[solarkraft]

Just the idea of a Linux phone! Use what you know and love, same code, same quirks, same features (man, how I hate feature inconsistency).

This is why it felt weird to me that there were special distributions at first, but it seems like we're finally mainlining (pretty standard Debian, Arch, Manjaro), which is nice.

It seems like GNOME shell is also being adapted, which is exactly what I wanted to see. Hopefully some other DEs and large apps will follow.

[kop316]

Agreed, Mobian is an awesome OS for the Pinephone. When it supports MMS I would feel comfortable using the Pinephone with Mobian as a daily phone.

[squeezingswirls]

>With Ubuntu Touch, you can not install anything on the phone.

You can install whatever you want using Libertine http://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/userguide/dailyuse/liberti...

[HugThem]

Have you done that?

[squeezingswirls]

Yes, I'm running some apps v.g. Emacs in a Libertine container.

[ginko]

>I am looking forward to one day having a phone that runs Linux. But then I want the same freedom I have on my laptop. To install whatever I want from the Debian repos via apt-get and update via apt-update / apt-upgrade.

I could do that on my Nokia N9 running Meego.

[Mekantis]

> I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.

This is a false equivalency. If you don't like Ubuntu Touch. Try Mobian (Debian) or Manjaro for Pinephone. The Linux phone is still in its infancy, but its prospects now are far better than they've ever been. And even if it's in a rough state right now, my next phone is going to be Linux simply because of how much control Google takes away from users (let's not even get started on Apple).