Things which made me postpone buying another phone to try linux

fair

Hi there, please note this post is very subjective and it's not meant to criticize all the work around UBports.

It all started with the desire to have a pocket device for everything - a true meaning of a smartphone. The hardware in an average phone nowadays fits the purpose perfectly, but not the OS, so a few months ago I've bought Fairphone 4 just to unlock it and flash some Linux, but eventually I upgraded to Fairphone 5 only to use it for a short time before I lost it.

so things which I was really missing every day:

Convenient UI navigation

The swype gesture navigation is really bad. I bet that someone who designed it never actually used it (kind of reminds me Windows 8 start menu design flop). It's just impossible to do swypes from left and right of the screen holding the phone with one hand - and that's a mobile phone UI!

I have no idea why this hasn't been fixed so far, but all in all I'd be happy with using some accessibility "magic ball" to configure whatever tap-shortcut actions I need instead of any swype guestures. That's my idea to work on

External keyboard

I though that USB keyboards are not supported so I even bought a BT keyboard, only to discover that the UI doesn't support them, only the apps. It's impossible to navigate the system with external keyboard, triggering the start menu, switching between apps, etc, etc. It's only possible to input text into apps, for example notepad or terminal

External display

It's not possible to select only external display, the phone screen will always be active as a virtual touch pad.

It' snot possible to select DPI for external display. Every time the UI Tweak app restarts Lomiri, it comes back with default scaling.

Likewise it's not possible to select resolution for external display. Fairphone 4 detected 4k screen but served only half-width desktop image (I guess the chip can't really drive full 4k resolution) so everything was horribly stretched on the screen.

No desktop, or advanced user install mode

So the OS is very limited in terms of apps, but on the same time is very restricted. The only way to use desktop apps is via Libertine (containers). I would very much prefer to have a normal desktop Linux experience when connected to external monitor, keyboard and mouse. Mobile UI and app restriction is only fine for "mobile mode"

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bottom line, these are a deal-breakers for me, therefore I'm not rushing to buy a new phone, but I'll keep watching Linux phone space, and maybe even find some time to contribute to have thing I want

Keneda

Is this thread and its four points about GNU/Linux on phones in general or about Ubuntu Touch in particular ?

gpatel-fr

@fair said in Things which made me postpone buying another phone to try linux:

holding the phone with one hand

Well, I use to actually walk in the street without a phone at all, so I have my eyes available to look at where I go and also other people; my personal polling is that 99% of people are holding their phone firmly in their two hands (except when they are using their phone as well, a phone, and then they use only one hand but they are just talking and listening, not trying to enter commands on their phone)
So I think that your critic, while valid per se, is not of concern in the real world of average people who are not acrobats of the phone handling. Average people who are trying to use their phone with one hand while walking are sooner than later coming to a phone repair shop.
A much better way to allow UT phone to be used one handed (or any phone really) would be to integrate the recent work to allow piloting the phone with vocal commands.

DJac

i understand your quest for the ultimate laptop-phone... i have the same.
And these are good remarks.

about the gesture navigation :
personnaly i use a 'little' smartphone (less than 5"), so i realy like the gesture navigation. but you are right : 5" is not the standard today... (for power and autonomy)
if you want, it is possible to enlarge the edge for tactil gesture (parameters > tactil gesture). it could help.
but in fact, i think from my first contact wit UT, that it could be good to add an option 'right hand' or 'left hand', that permit to inverse the app position.

about the desktop :
the question is often asked and i don't clearly understand the strategy of 'convergent desktop' of lomiri. but it seems to be important...
Personnaly I appreciate lomiri (the gesture navigation, the switch between apps...), but i will prefered it with a more 'standard' desktop (with short cuts...).

if you want, with a FP, you can have a look on PostmarketOS (base on alpine linux). it propose a great variery of UI (phosh, gnome, plasma mobile, kde desktop..). but, the OS is less advanced than Ubuntu touch...
you can also try Mobian (from debian) (with phosh or plasma mobile). i have not already try it...
i also hear about Pure OS (from debian too ?), but i never explore this way.
be carefull to be able to come back to android or else (i block my oneplus6 on PMOS and try to come back to UT for month.. XD)

kugiigi

I'm afraid if you don't like the swipe gestures then Ubuntu Touch isn't for you. It won't change most likely ever. Many people actually like it. Not everyone uses their phone with one hand and some people have big enough hands to still use big phones nowadays with one hand.

It's not perfect though. Obviously, it can be improved such as adding an option to interchange the left and right edge functions. For one hand use, having a better way to go back in apps would be great. There's a lot of discussion about that already but nothing has come out of it yet. I personally have an experimental horizontal swipe at the bottom which I think works well but still not sure how well it'll work as a standard in UT.

About the keyboard, not sure why your experience is like that. Lomiri, the system UI, supports keyboard navigation. It literally exists on desktop distros now and quite usable. Bluetooth can be wonky though so it's probably that.

fair

@kugiigi said in Things which made me postpone buying another phone to try linux:

About the keyboard, not sure why your experience is like that. Lomiri, the system UI, supports keyboard navigation. It literally exists on desktop distros now and quite usable. Bluetooth can be wonky though so it's probably that.

That's interesting, how do you switch apps with keyboard for example? I've tried Alt+Tab, Super+Tab, Ctrl+Tab, with keyboard in Win/Mac/Android mode. Navigation was only possible with mouse, steering to the right edge of the screen the touch task switcher was triggered.

PS. I remember your reply about the experimental gestures from my earlier thread. In the end I didn't test it. Actually this remands me of a "gesture app" from a custom Android rom (perhaps it was in last Cyanogenmod) where it was possible to define your own gestures, for example swyping a Z, S, L, / , , O, 8 shape and attach it to an action or an app shortcut. IIRC it had to be one stroke shape, which was smoothed out to something simpler so you didn't have to swype it perfectly each time. That one was really handy.

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PS2 to other replies

This feedback was about things rarely or never brought up. Usually people ask around for banking app support or app availability in general, OS stability, battery life. Things like these are either assumed as given and then comes disappointment, or it falls into 'not my use case' category.

I hope I helped people for whom it matters with OS choice decision, likewise gave an opportunity to consider improvements in these areas. As a software developer and Linux user I planned to address those things in some spare time. At this moment, no more having the phone, I'm not sure. I'll probably buy another FP if, and only if, I'll have the spare time ahead I'd want to spend on tinkering with the code.

I've seen the other thread 'Edge Cases'. That's a great initiative. IMO there are only 2 two things which make people move back to Android:

Bugs, i.e. OS stability
Limitations
a - daily app availability (most likely more than half of the users would have to carry around a second Android/IOS phone)
b - OS functionality limitations, like the things I listed in my first post
c - hardware limitation, For me FP 5 hardware is more than I need, not lacking anything except the camera, where it lacks terribly. The Android OS camera app post process the pictures heavily so it gets them a bit better, but overall it's all very basic/mediocre to the point that I'd love to shed another $200 for a good class camera replacement, but Fairphone doesn't offer anything.