Hi Folks,
I will try to take you on a journey into Portingland, of which I once said it´s like a rabbit hole, making a bad quote from Alice in Wonderland.
On this endeavour I will be accompanied by other people from the community. It will be fun, full of Information and nobody knows where we are going to land.
We will start next week. Possible formats are blog style, small videos and podcasts. Let´s see! Your Feedback will be welcomed.
BR Florian
And to create some tension and excitement, I hope we are able to co-announce more hardware later this year 
This is an upgrade port for the Nexus 5 core device. The current port uses classic porting on Android 5.1 with lots of band aids and mixture of blobs etc. The new port is on Halium 7.1 level.
Sources
Kernel: https://github.com/ubports/android_kernel_lge_hammerhead/tree/halium-7.1
Device: https://github.com/ubports/android_device_lge_hammerhead/tree/halium-7.1
Manifest: https://github.com/ubports/device-builds/blob/halium/lge_hammerhead.xml
Status
Working
Working with additional steps
For camera, please follow the steps here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/3257/how-to-test-gstreamer-droid-based-camera-support-in-ubuntu-touch-for-halium-7-1-based-port
Not working
Not tested:
Install:
Assuming you have already Ubuntu Touch installed. That means, the bootloader is unlocked and a UT recovery is in place. You need a Linux PC with adb and fastboot installed.
fastboot flash boot halium-boot.imghalium-install-standalone.sh -p ut ubports-touch.rootfs-xenial-armhf.tar.gz system.imgadb rebootNow the device should boot into the new system.
So as one of the Q&A frequent passengers a few words... 
I am against any move until we see a negative impact for us. We got over 300 repos hosted on Github now, and Infrastructure is already now under pressure with keeping up with open work items. Moving now, not even when the deal is dry, without seeing any policy changes is overreacted IMHO. We want to finish OTA-4, and when we start moving to Gitlab now you can forget any release at end of June, or even longer.
After OTA-4 we can review this again. But I strictly disagree on any fast reaction now.
Hello everyone,
in order to better understand what´s important for you when it comes to mobile device features please help me and answer the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8YRKL95 - we want to set minimum quality levels for ports and therefore need to know what makes a good device nowadays.
Thanks Florian
Just a heads-up for all beloved OPO users, there is a working H9 port being prepared, and we try to get this into a state where you all can test it.
This is a pre-requisite to try to carry this device over to 20.04 base. I feel excited, and we will keep you updated!
I can understand your frustration, but the problem is also not only we have limited resources for hardware adaption but overall limited resources.
As Ubuntu 16.04 is end of life now, we have to rush to support 20.04 LTS and that takes up all the resources. Minor steps are done still for Pinephone, but you wont notice so much. Like we fixed the speakerphone obviously these days.
And yes, we hoped to finally attract more developers to help us expanding and pushing forward but it simply did not happen. Linux devs got frustrated with UT concepts, especially confinement and isolation of apps, readonly filesystems etc. What works well for the end users does not work well with devs it seems.
We hope to bring a few more improvements for Pinephone later this year. But for the moment all our 3 or 4 fulltime devs are fully employed with upgrading the whole distribution, involving up to 400 repositories and deb packages to be rebuilt and fixed. It takes months, unfortunately.
Just 2 cents from a Windows user:
The Windows desktop was made in resemblance to a real desk and the things you find there: Files, Folders and even a trashbin (technically not ON the desktop ofc). Its a matter of personal preference HOW you organize your desktop:
My current desktop at work has 32 items: A mixture of starter icons, documents and whatever. Windows got adopted also for the "chaotic" way how you can work with it. It tries to give you maximum freedom on that:
Does anybody understand what´s going on here? No. Does the owner of this desktop understand it? Yes, and he might be most productive with it.
During work, I almost never have to go to the desktop, however. I use it rarely. Also a matter of personal preference.
Can´t we just offer: Appdrawer AND background to organize stuff? You could pin starters and documents to the background (Problem: convergence and how to deal with the layout?)
A good DE gives all users a possible way to develop their own habits and preferences. Not try to force them into a single use pattern.
BR
Today I can announce that the Onepls 5 and 5T have reached a state where the UBports Installer can be used to install the devel channel, and OTA updates can be installed as well. That will make testing a lot easier. Follow this thread to get the necessary installer configs, we are just fixing them up so they do the right thing.
Fellow Community,
TLDR;
we are doing some changes to our policy regarding the release candidate (RC) channel´s policy: while previously a new RC image was published every Wednesday morning CET we will publish a new RC only on demand from now on.
What are the reasons for that?
FAQ
I hope that this change will suit you all well. Leave a message with any concerns.
BR Florian
Hello everyone!
The expected release date for Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is Tuesday, June 28th 2022.
This forum post is a companion to the OTA-23 Call For Testing
Please post any general observations you have while testing the current image in the RC channel, as compared to OTA-22, in this thread. The current release candidate (RC) is 2022-W24.
If you have any comments on any of the specific issues in the OTA-22 tracker, please post them in the issue thread so they are easier to track. OTA-23 tracker: https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/34
Please note that only critical and security fixes will be able to enter OTA-23 as this point, normal bug fixes and new features will need to wait for our next release. Please do not discuss normal bug fixes and new features here.
And here it is: The first episode! https://soundcloud.com/ubports/porting-a-true-journey-episode-1-where-do-we-begin - Enjoy!
@3arn0wl You need to make small steps. If you shoot for a high end device but it has constant problems, nobody will buy it, you failed and have wasted a lot of money. Once we have a basic phone and people see that things are working, we can talk about a Pro model ^^
W.I.P. - Work in progress, I could not try this, as my WiFi driver does not support P2P mode
Motivation
Many of us do not have either a N5, a slimport adapter or a wifi dongle for Miracast, but want to try out convergence to see if they like it. Fun fact, there is an open-source development called Miraclecast which also provides a sink, i.e. an endpoint for the phone to cast the screen to.
Preconditions
Your wireless NIC should support the following modes in order to do P2P communication:
This can be found out by using the iw phy command. Check for supported interface modes in the output when you run the iw phy command. Most of the modern WirelessNICs support this feature. Do not mix it up with the supported frames, the list follows after
Supported interface modes:
How - Linux
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/miraclecastsudo apt-get updatesudo apt install miraclecastsystemctl stop NetworkManager.service && systemctl stop wpa_supplicant.servicesudo miracle-wifid &sudo miracle-sinkctlrun my_number_hereHow - Windows
Luckily the steps involved with Windows as OS are much less. Basically you can try this with either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. For Windows 8.1 please try to install the demo version of this software: AirServer Universal. For Windows 10 there is a integrated solution available:
You either get "The device doesn't support Miracast, so you can't project to it wirelessly", or " 'name' is ready for you to connect wirelessly".
Hi fellow bacon users
After some really tough challenges with recovery, fake cache and a lot of confusion, the Oneplus One finally reaches a testable state in Focal's devel channel. Now we need you!
A lot of features in this list: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/bacon/release/focal/ still show a question mark and need to be tested.
Note that this is not a daily driver yet, so do not test it on your main device.
Also very important is to only use installer version 0.10.0 with the "Bootstrap" option! do not simply change channels from inside UT.
Let us know in this thread how this worked out for you...
BR Florian
@PINE64 I am starting to get nervous, with so many devices being online, if even half of them would only go for Ubuntu Touch, we need to ramp up our infrastructure for push notifications soon ^^
@guru No need anymore! I got high-level contact to BQ today ... Actually the highest possible level We will send them our ideas and questions. Lets hope smth happens then
BR
We need more communication nerds for the community - I can only say that if there are big news we will spread them.
20.04 I do not have much progress, and it seems to me as if the team starts seeing roadblocks and tries to work around them but it takes more and more time. So, this will be again delayed by months.
OTS-23: We had regressions with Bluetooth and other stuff, also our CI fails to build all devices, but with some luck we can deliver the first RC for OTA-23 this week.
Thanks @UniSuperBox you have grown into an important role for the users, the foundation guys, for all of us. You are keeping an eye on things that others tend to overlook (esp. in Infra ^^), you are the best host we can have for the Q&As, and you do all this from out of another timezone, which for me would be th hardest part.
Thanks @NeoTheThird for the big product increment in the installer this year. From a quickly assembled thingie with lots of complicated stuff this has grown into a usable product which all other communities do not have, not with the features and also not with the slickness.
Thanks @mariogrip for hacking into the weirdest C++ hell in Unity 8 and Mir, I think no one else would be brave enough to do this, and then in the same time have "just little chats" with @alan_g as they sound like you would talk about gardening or the weather. With you digging all those mud piles we have the biggest possible product increment for the UX and UI that a small team like us could have. Not to say you are driving also the !Android phones (Not-Android lol) stuff, down to Rpi...
Thanks @dobey for being kinda 24/7 community manager, even if you sound like a club bouncer sometimes Your input is most valuable for us, for the users and for all new devs. It is impossible to drive this project without a few insiders, and you are currently the most active of them. I hope we can give back some day for what you have invested in time, answering our dumbest questions and rectifiying our bogus ideas about architecture.
Thanks @DanChapman for bootstrapping TELEports in such a nice way that we could build the probably most complex native App for UT out there in a few man months - besides your own Dekko 2 of course! And although I know, you probably wont read this anymore, I wanna say thank you. You have departed the project this year, for reasons we dont know and we would have hoped for a long time that it is not forever. While this hope is fading we all would be grateful to hearing from you again in the future.
Thanks @Krille @TimSueberkrueb @hummlbach jonny and all the others from the German group! You are self-organizing hackathons, you try to invest time and motivation into whatever product needs love most at a time. While we know that Germany has a big UT userbase, it is not common expectation and you do an outstanding job.
And finally: Thanks to all users! We would be nothing without you. Patiently waiting until things are fixed, and some bugs take years to proceed. Constantly trying to motivate us to go over the limit, to keep UT alive and useful. Giving us a reason of existence for this project. I remember when we started with way below 100 people in the first Telegram group, and how it filled up to 200 only days after Canonical sunk the ship. And when we got so much excited to see that there are enough people there that wont let it sink too much
2019 was a terrific year for UT. But I am really excited about what will come in 2020. Next year we will write history.