Kind of surprised this actually works
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Pulled my old Nexus 5 out of my drawer and gave Ubuntu touch a shot. To my surprise, the vast majority of things seem to work, including wifi, bluetooth, etc. and performance with one or two apps open isnt even half bad for such an old phone (writing this post on it).
I have just a few snags I'm curious if others have experenced. Not looking for fixes exactly since this is just an old backup phone, just wondering if my mileage is good, bad, expected, etc.
Libertine- works fine for cli apps, basically non functional for gui ones. They fail to install, fail to launch, or are broken in some way (firefox will no load anything, as an example)
Youtube- the youtube dev app manages to play 720p video, no other app or browser appears old to manage more than like 240p. I assume this is related to hardware video support.
Maps- no map websites or apps seem to be able to find my location. Might be because I'm not using cell functions (just wifi, although location is turned on of course)
Scaling- many web apps from the store do not scale properly.
Battery- kind of sucks, but its an old phone so hard to say for sure.
Otherwise my only complaints are lack of software (hopefully anbox and improved libertine resolve this in the future). Very interesting project here, hopefully it has a future on more phones.
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@jlnxr Can only comment on battery-yes not great and a well known issue. GPS can take 20-40 mins to get a first fix after that it should be OK depending on where you are in the world. Leave the phone by a window at the very least but best outside and make sure the screen stays on.
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Hi @jlnxr ,
Yes Libertine works well for CLI with ARM64 existing packages but GUI apps are not meant for the mobile form factor, you won't have good results with it.
Hardware acceleration does not work for the N5 hence poor performances on video reading.
That is a known limitation.The scaling of webapps is probably due to the original website or the lack of maintenance of said app. If your experience is based on Facebook, that is something that they do voluntarily to force the use of their dedicated iOS or android apps.
