Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC

[Lakotaubp]

Please note the date change to the Q&A.

[Kristoffer_Umea]

Anyone interested in making a page on Indiegogo to make a device that runs Ubuntu natively, a flagship similar to the leading brands now that we have full GPU acceleration through the AsahiLinux project which I suspect use the upstream kernel?

I'd be happy to put some money into it.

[ghazouani]

I have tried many distributions, including UT, and the difference I noticed in terms of stability and meeting my needs from the phone and applications was a huge difference. Here I say that in terms of stability, I liked UT and sailfishos,and sailfish is very hot but the rest have a variety of applications and many advanced features, and they suffer from system instability. What I want to say is that with the presence of stability, this is not enough. UT suffers greatly from a lack of the most used applications and those required by the average user. I know the great difficulties and the effort expended, but without focusing on the most important applications, it will be useless because whoever tries UT and does not find the required applications will not use UT. The last thing I tried was silfishos, which is really great, and I found everything I was looking for, a web engine based on Firefox, an alternative to Signal, with instant notification and other applications that are all updated, and many system applications. I say this because I am a user and a fan of UT, and I do not see any progress at all in terms of time applications, even teleports are not safe and I do not use them. I hope that you will keep up with the development that is happening and give the basic and required applications more time.
A poll can be made about the most required applications for the average user to the professional and put them on a list instead of wasting time on applications that are not needed and are a goal to work on in the future.
Honestly, I see other distributions making great progress and diversity and UT has the same applications.
I hope you do not misunderstand my words. Believe me, I love UT and I want it to progress without useful applications. I do not think so.

[Moem]

@ghazouani said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC:

A poll can be made about the most required applications for the average user to the professional and put them on a list

A list is easy to make. But who will make those applications?

[domubpkm]

Browser, browser, browser and ..... browser ! I don't see anything else... Given that browser is the basis of a smartphone and that currently with focal we have a very imperfect use of browsers, what can we expect for the end of life of focal and to what extent the browser(s) will be operational (or good) for the first update to 24.04 will be there.

[arubislander]

@domubpkm said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC:

Browser, browser, browser and ..... browser ! I don't see anything else...

If this is a comment you would like a reaction to from the hosts, could you explain a bit more what you mean?

[Caedem]

Hurray for 150 Q&As!

Regarding the recent UT Noble upgrade, would you recommend people using only UT as a daily driver upgrade yet, or wait for Noble to be a bit more "stable"? Specifically for FP4 as that's what I'm using
Second question, regarding apps on Noble: will Focal apps work on Noble? I remember many Xenial apps stopped working and had to be upgraded to Focal.
Many thanks!

[arubislander]

@Caedem said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC:

Regarding the recent UT Noble upgrade,

There is no noble upgrade yet. There is an install for developers to help in ironing out the issues. So it is definitely not something for daily driving. Not even for the casual used to test.

[lazarus]

Hi, thank you for your great Q&A community event!

I've got a question regarding (partial) file system encryption. I think for real world usage it's really important to have at least parts of the FS encrypted (namely /home, /tmp and swap).

It really may happen that you loose your phone and random people should be able to access your data then.

I'm interested into what's the state of this feature? I heard it was begun to work on it? What is needed to make this happen? What kind of action would be helpful to support that?

Thanks in advance!
Lazarus

[Equareo]

Hi! Community stalker here! I used to stalk/read the Dev sync notes, but they haven't been updated since April. Will they be back, or are you hiding from me?

[Timespansoul]

Without getting political, I feel like Telegram is a strange choice as a community platform. I choose to avoid Telegram for political and personal reasons that I'd love to express here but this really isn't the place for it. I would like to better understand the relationship between Conanical and Telegram. Maybe someone could PM me and enlighten me.

My question, if ubports has its own messaging board then why does UT, who claim to give you the "freedom of choice", force their users to use what is basically proprietary software to get complete access to the UT experience? Not to mention Telegram requires "VERY" sensitive data to use their platform.

As it stands, one does NOT have access to the full UT experience if they don't have Telegram, creating segregation in the community. I would say that this goes against the essence of linux.

Wouldn't it make more sense to centralize the UT experience here at ubports.com? By being centralized, you aren't forcing your community to release sensitive data to questionable companies that are worth billions of dollars.

Or we could change "We want you to be free" to "we want you to use Telegram".

I'd be interested to know how people feel about this.

[AppLee]

Hi @Equareo

Sorry we couldn't answer your question during the Q&A.
I don't have the answer to your question, but I will have a look at it and try to see if I can find who did it and why it stopped.

[messayisto]

@UBportsNews Hello and thank you for the q&a!
Can someone please explain the news about VoLTe in more detail? What wll happen next, is there a plan for implementation? And which devices will be able to do this?
with many thanks for all your hard work on it

[AppLee]

Hi @Timespansoul

Sorry we couldn't answer your question during the Q&A.

To answer your question, the community is organized around the tools that our members have access to.
Teleports is well supported and open enough to accommodate for our notification service, that's why it has been a go-to for the community.
We have channels on Matrix, but it needs more people to moderate it and bridging with Telegram has been spotty...

Also we don't force anyone to go to Telegram, the forum is fine and better IMHO to find helpful information.
If people expect "customer service" via "whatsapp", the closest they can come to with Ubuntu Touch is our Telegram channels.
But hey we are all for freedom, so if they prefer to reach out using another mean, then great.

I don't understand what makes you write this:

As it stands, one does NOT have access to the full UT experience if they don't have Telegram, creating segregation in the community.

As we say in my profession "You say that because you're angry".
That's some kind of joke based on the fact that stating someone is angry makes them angry. We use it when some unfair argument is made by someone...

[AppLee]

Hi @messayisto

I don't know much about it.
But from what I understand, work has been made on Qualcomm and on Mediatek SoC with various success on a couple of devices.

The news today was that a plugin for Ofono allowing VoLTE for mediatek devices has been published.

I think this is only for 24.04 ; the development devices is the Volla X-23 and on the upcoming Quintus should benefit from it.
The hope is that this implementation for this specific phone will work on most Mediatek devices with Noble.
Or maybe porters can try to integrate this plugin in their current port, but I'm not so sure about that.

For our US friends, it means the Quintus (international version) might be the first device allowing VoLTE working for them but some frequency stuff might be at play, so be aware of this.

There is still some work to do on the Qualcomm side (i.e. Fairphone 5) with the hope that it will also work for other Qualcomm devices...

So yeah, very good news, but let's not get too crazy about it, there are still a lot of uncertainties.

[AppLee]

Hi @Kristoffer_Umea

If I understand correctly you want to bring back the Ubuntu Edge phone that Canonical tried to launch but failed to raise enough money...

We do not have the means to do this, but if you feel up to the task, go ahead that would be great.

[messayisto]

@AppLee Thanks!

[Timespansoul]

@AppLee How is what I said an unfair argument?

I'm sure many would argue that the only reason they signed up with Telegram is to have access to porting notes etc. for UT projects.

I mean, even the documentation steers people to use Telegram:

"There are online Telegram chat groups you can join to ask for help, but please bear in mind that those participating are doing so in their spare time."

So saying it's a choice is stretching the truth especially considering that there is a business relationship there with a strategy. I'm not sure what you don't understand about what I said, it's true and totally valid given the "circumstances".

We haven't even touched on privacy. No anger here, it's a question of ethics. I was also curious as to what kind of answer I would get. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone on this one.

I will agree that the support here has been more than acceptable and is a great forum.

[arubislander]

@Timespansoul said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC:

especially considering that there is a business relationship there with a strategy.

There is no business relationship between Telegram and the UBports foundation. And as far as there is a strategy it was as follows:

Canonical had some type of relationship with Telegram in that there was some kind of cooperation between Telegram and Canonical to get a functioning Telegram client on Ubuntu for Phones when the first phones with Ubuntu for Phones was launched. Telegram was the only one of the 'mainstream' messaging platforms that was open to integrating support for the Push service that Canonical had developed and hosted for Ubuntu for Phones. This resulted in a semi official Telegram client for Ubuntu Touch.

Because Telegram was the only natively supported chat client from the very beginning, naturally all the different communities formed on that platform. And because the network effect kicked in, when Canonical ceased development of Ubuntu Touch and the Telegram app started to progressively deteriorate, the community devs decided to create Teleports, based on the Telegram library to service the already present community groups on Telegram.

As @AppLee mentioned, there are also Matrix channels and previously they were bridged with Telegram (or the other way around) but there were no committed maintainers for the bridges, and insufficient committed moderators on there. Also the support for Matrix chat clients is ... sub par ... on UT currently.

The documentation mentions the channels because that's where people are. If we would move to somewhere else,, the documentation would be changed. But it is not easy to move a whole community to a different platform. Especially if we want them to be able to access that platform from their UT devices too.

[dobey]

@arubislander said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 150 Saturday 5th October 19:00 UTC:

Also the support for Matrix chat clients is ... sub par ... on UT currently.

To be clear, even ignoring using Matrix clients on UT, the basic user experience of Matrix, with pretty much any client on any platform, is inferior to that of Telegram.

Not to mention, if one thinks that we are somehow forcing people to use Telegram for UT already, how are the few thousand people already participating in our community on Telegram supposed to feel if we were to force them onto some other chat platform, because of a single person's politics on this forum? Forcing everyone into a worse user experience to continue chatting with people in the community is not beneficial to anyone.

If @Timespansoul doesn't want to use Telegram, that's fine, and they don't have to. Nobody is forcing them. Feel free to not use it, and deal with any difficulties you may have as a result, in the same way that choosing to use a phone OS that isn't iOS or Android introduces difficulties in your life. Nobody here is forcing you to use Telegram if you don't want to.