Battery life is usually less than expected due to unoptimized software and processors clocking too high. On my devices, I set the CPU governor to 'powersave', which reduces power usage but also performance.
There are multiple scaling governor settings which might not be available on all devices (depends on kernel configuration)

• performance : high frequency; slightly increased performance and battery consumption
• powersave : low frequency; reduced performance and superior batter life
• schedutil : changes according to the scheduler (default on my device)

This command list the available governors to set for each core (should be more than those I listed above)
sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
Report which governors are currently selected for each core:
sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Set the scaling governor to powersave to every core:
echo "powersave" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

The commands above do not need mounting root as read-write, any change is reverted on reboot.
I tried to make an app for configuring these (a while ago) but I had trouble with sudo.

@Twigg Many questions indeed, I will try to answer them as accurately as I can, so if anyone knows more, feel free to correct me.

Before answering your questions, I think it is necessary to clear any misconceptions about the Android kernel.
Most Android devices don't support mainline Linux, so the upstream kernel can't work on the device, as it is missing specific drivers and device trees. That is because the SoC manufacturers (Qualcomm/MediaTek) use an older kernel as a base to test their new designs, and that old kernel is subsequently used by the device manufacturers (e.g. Fairphone). Of course, neither of them bother isolating the changes to create a pull request to upstream Linux (due to costs etc.). As a result, Ubuntu Touch developers have to do extra patches to make the downstream patched kernel work for them.

Does you mean that the FF5 did not support mainline Linux?

Yes, Fairphone officially didn't, but the community has (see the PostmarketOS port)

Why the change with FF6?

I don't know. Maybe they hope they can attract more Linux enthusiast (like us).

I wonder about the advantages/disadvantages to using mainline Linux vs the Hallum approach

Mainline Linux enables more flexibility and a desktop-like experience. However, it is more difficult to make everything work there, postmarketOS is a great example, as almost none of their devices currently support the same hardware features as they did on Android. Not even Qualcomm themselves have succeeded in fully working mainline Linux kernel, as the recent Snapdragon X Elite chips which were made to compete with x86 still don't have full Linux support.

Halium on the other hand uses the same downstream kernel as Android does, with some adaptations for Ubuntu. It also runs the Android drivers on an LXC container, which allows easier access to hardware. As you can imagine, this has limitations, as we can't change the Android drivers and pulling patches from upstream Linux can break functionality.

I presume that this amounts to a desktop equivilence to doing a clean install of Ubuntu, vs installing it in Windows?

I don't get your analogy. It would be more accurate to say that to install normal Ubuntu, you have to reverse engineer the Windows drivers. However, in Ubuntu Touch's case we can reuse the Android drivers as the Linux kernel remains mostly the same.

From what I have read above, it looks like there haven't been too many changes from FF5 to FF6, so perhaps that makes it easier for Ubuntu Touch to get released on the FF6?

Each device needs its own port, sometimes even devices with the same chip require very different ports. In this case FP6 seems vastly different hardware-wise than FP5 so I don't think they would be similar software-wise.

@captainfunk said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 168 call for questions:

Are you thinking or planning to implement the screen rotation to 180 degrees ?

It depends on if the porter enabled it. The configuration file is located on /etc/deviceinfo/devices/<codename>.yaml. Taking the Volla X23 configuration file as a random example:

  SupportedOrientations:
    - Portrait
    - Landscape
    - InvertedLandscape

As you can see, there is no "InvertedPortrait" mode enabled. I don't know adding it below will work.

---

Edit: (sorry, just noticed the Q&A was 3 days ago...)

It will also support mainline Linux (like the pinephone) as the patches have already been submitted: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fairphone-6-Linux.
I suppose the Ubuntu Touch port will be Halium based but it is certainly nice anyway.

@ds2k5 You can enable the SSH server from UT tweak tool.

@mihael In the same directory normal Debian-based distros with NetworkManager do:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/WIFI_SSID.nmconnection

@TeckMonster There is a port for the Samsung Fold 3 (https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/community-ports/android11/samsung-galaxy-z-fold3), you may want to ask its status on Telegram, and if the porter got the screen switching working.

@bbiw You can contribute to translations in the Lomiri Weblate project: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/.

@Salah I believe it should work fine, as these icons neither large (to fill the partition) nor a dependency to something.
I had modified lomiri's qml by editing some files, and there wasn't any issue.
You can try, and if it fails reflash.

@wally Just ported the app to 20.04, changing icons works!
This is the new repository: https://gitlab.com/ikozyris/custom-phablet-tools,
I plan to publish it to the open store if it works for others as well.
Took me ~2 hours.
I might add a way to add custom icons, currently they are downloaded from https://framagit.org/ubuntouch-fr-dev/custom-phablet-tools/raw/media/icons/[APP-NAME.EXTENSION].

Just to clarify what the scaling governor is because there is some confusion that it magically improves battery life: The scaling governor (as I had already said in a post some years ago) essentially doesn't allow the CPU to increase its frequency and thus saves power. Note that performance doesn't scale linearly with frequency so the processor is most power efficient during low frequencies. However, while the device is idle, an optimized OS does many other things including changing the governor to save power like disabling the performance cores. So, any benefits should be observed only while using the phone, unless of course the port is not optimized at all.

@Linus67 it needs to be ran as root. Sudo is interactive in terminal so it won't work, but pkexec is the GUI equivalent so it should launch a popup for the password. Alternatively set the suid bit of the script to make it always run as root without password (and ensure the file is not writable by phablet as that would allow local privilege escalation).

@Linus67 Yes, these commands will always work on any Linux device since they rely on kernel APIs. Be aware of the noticeable performance impact, while powersave governor increases efficiency (performance per watt), it can increase latency on old devices.
About the app, I thought it would be better if it were part of a larger "power saver" app since a single app with 3 buttons that not only is unconfined but also needs root access seems unecessary.

@nbdynl This problem is not specific to UT, it is in fact how aircrack works. It forces the device to disconnect and captures the handshake when it attempts to reconnect. The good thing is that the handshake doesn't have the actual password in plain text, so to perform such an attack you have to know the password (and of course be in proximity to the client).

@brenno.almeida said:

as far as I know there's no such mechanisms in Ubuntu Touch for us to use.

Have you seen the secret-tool package? It's similar to using GNOME keyring.
You can also write your own keyring mechanism assuming your daemon starts before any app. It will store the keys in plain text when the phone is powered off and thus rely on full storage encryption. When the device boots up, the daemon will read the key from the file, store it in its memory and encrypt the file with the file's content as key. This daemon will communicate with your app via dbus or similar and send the keys only to the appropriate app id.

@pparent I always used a different (and simpler) formula taken from Morph: https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/morph-browser/-/blob/main/src/app/qml-qt5/KeyboardRectangle.qml

height: Qt.inputMethod.visible ?
            Qt.inputMethod.keyboardRectangle.height / (units.gridUnit / 8) : 0

It is just a helper rectangle as a module that takes the same space as the keyboard and can be used for anchoring since it has an id (see the whole KeyboardRectangle file).

@bbiw You can contribute to translations in the Lomiri Weblate project: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/.

@GooglyBear That command essentially downloads and flashes the latest image from the system-image server, but I didn't find the exact url (it may be visible in the installer logs while attempting to flash).
Instead, you can download the development images from the GitLab repository and flash ubuntu.img with fastboot flash system_a ubuntu.img, assuming you have ran the previous resize/delete operations.

However, if you have made it past the delete (which failed on the other user) you shouldn't have any issue not to use the installer,

@pparent

Example from this review: https://itsfoss.com/news/pinephone-review/
"As a result, users of it are subject to Ubuntu Touch’s “locked-down” style, similar to Android and iOS."

" PinePhone owners are generally tinkerers who like control over their device, which is made much harder with Ubuntu Touch."

Actually apt is allowed in the PinePhone, so the article linked is mistaken. Which is typical for that site since it is not technical. The "locked-down style" is particularly wrong and shows the author hasn't done any research at all.
In general, new people coming into UT should expect having to adapt to things being different than their Linux distro. I like to describe the Ubuntu Touch experience as the closest you can get to the familiar GNU/Linux stack while retaining the phone's original functionality.

@gpatel-fr These small utilities can installed with nix or just copy the executable from the .deb to .local/bin.