@grenudi said in We Drop Ubuntu Touch Entirely:

500+ device ports versus Ubuntu Touch's approximately 50

uh? I am currently evaluating my options on getting a so called 'smart' phone again without Google and of course Apple, and from what I see PostmarketOS has ONE (1) device that can (more or less) qualify as 'daily driver': the Pinephone. Not sure if it's even compatible with the carriers in MY country.
My understanding is that UT has about 10.
From this point of view, UT has more coverage but if you have lot of credible stories of people using Volla or Google or Fairphone or Samsung devices under PostmarketOS as their daily drivers, I am all ears.
By the way your expletives about the forum are making you seem like a troll. Sorry but that's very much what it looks. This forum is working really well and I'm favourably impressed by NodeBB.

@shano said in Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?:

Compiz was released in 2006 and is still maintained. Unity7 was released in 2010 and is still maintained. My question is why Wayland and Lomiri are so far away in terms of functionality, plugins etc. compared to tech made 20 years ago.

Are we building on top or reinventing the wheel?

From what I see, Lomiri is not reinventing Unity 8, it is Unity 8.
I downloaded the Lomiri source code and counted roughly 18000 commits between 2013 and 2017 (end of Ubuntu involvement) and 1400 commits between 2018 and 2025. The main reason is probably that Unity was a business project with serious resources behind it, while Lomiri (the new name for Unity 8 since 2020) is an open source project with a few part time volunteers. Also, it may be that there was so much work in Unity that there is not a lot of new development necessary, the bulk of new work being in other parts of the full (and huge) smart phone stack. I did not count but I think that a large part of these 1400 commits are just translations.

I don't know Compiz but I tracked the project in its last hideout on Gitlab and counted about 30 commits in last 5 years, 20 of them in 2020. It's maintained in the most limited sense, there is almost no development.

@poVoq

hello, not the dev here - but the links are not broken for me. The app is supposed to be based on

https://github.com/luigi311/ConverseJS-ubports

the links are a bit strange though (why not a software forge ? if the author don't like Github, there are other such as codeberg...). It's not stated in the original repo that the author has given up. Personally I'd not use this software without more information.

@kristatos said in Smooth Edges (name pending) - Let's Fix the Bugs That Drive You Mad:

if the input is to slow?

FIY I have noticed that disabling haptic feedback was leading to me typing faster. I don't know if it's psychological or if the buzz is really slowing the keyboard. Give it a test if you don't have disabled it yet.

@Moem said in Status of the Location Service (GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo) ?:

I don't know what any of that means

it's a service provided by Qualcomm

https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/security/network-activity/

http://izatcloud.net/

See an analysis here:

https://ti.qianxin.com/blog/articles/Analysis-of-the-Hidden-Backdoor-Event-in-Qualcomm-GPS-Service-EN/

TLDR: backdoor is too strong a word, but there are privacies issues. If the software is rewritten as open source, this could be less problematic.

Duh ! I will close this stoopid post, I had not used seriously a smartphone since several years and did not realize anymore how sensitive to location Gps services are. I tried only in 2 places in my home and both where unsuitable. When I got out in the air, Gps started to work. So it is working, really. I did a stroll this morning and it updated its position. I have still to get my hands to another brand of smartphone on Android to compare with the Fairphone 5 under UT to see how well it is working.

@uxes said in Enabling MAC randomization:

shipped on our system by default

I am not sure that any phone is doing that by default.
It has also a downside for anyone using this phone with ssh, that is, the IP address affected by the Dhcp server (the wifi access point) will change often.
It's not a big deal but it can be annoying.

@GooglyBear said in GPS don't seem to work on FP5 UT 24.04 stable:

a GitLab issue to follow progress for Fairphone 5

AGPS is not really linked to a specific port (even if it can work on some devices it seems, but it's mostly unintended). It's tracked here

@Charly

I have seen one post seeming to say that it was restored in the most bleeding edge version, I can't vouch for it as I use stable, however if you install crackle you can use nix immediately and you can get the nix version of rsync (more up-to-date than the Ubuntu 24.04 version).

https://gitlab.com/tuxecure/crackle-apt/crackle
https://gitlab.com/EricHeintzmann/ubuntu-touch/xiaomi-surya/-/wikis/Install-with-crackle

Once you have crackle running, run 'crackle install rsync' and you are there

@pparent

Maybe their goal is only to target phones and desktop was a non-goal for the people giving orders (that's the one who are supposed to represent citizens eh), and at a first approximation on phones there are only 2 operating systems, and there are several cross-platforms framework targeting Android and IOS that may be more efficient - or known - for this limited target.

Also behind the facade of openness, there are still quite a lot of love of secret in the French administration. Having a GPL licensed framework like QT is a negative point in this perspective since there is some additional weight to have to share the source. I don't have proof of this speculation and possibly the deciding persons don't even know what is a software license.

@RapidRotator said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

I'll look into it then

you can begin with this issue
You'll note that there is a privacy concern too; if UT devs were ready to trample it, it would be easier.

@kugiigi said in Tip: call a contact with one hand (secret UT key !):

This is definitely a bug

If you say so, however if I can insist, the phone would actually be more usable and intuitive if the icon for adding a contact could be copied, removing the '+' and left displayed by default. Going in the contacts app using the top right button feels cumbersome to me in comparison, needs attention to press the right button, easy when confortably sit at a desk, less so when walking in a street, half of the time I press the wrong button, or I need to stop walking and look carefully at the phone screen.

Unrelated: when displaying the recent calls list and selecting one (that's also an operation difficult to do with one hand BTW), the add to contact is then made visible and I don't see the logic why because if clicking it, the selected number is not proposed for a new contact.
My first intuition is that the add to contact (the character symbol with a '+') should be displayed only after pressed the '+' button. Minor gripe but this is a very important app for an object that is still often called a phone instead of a pocket computer.

@kugiigi said in Tip: call a contact with one hand (secret UT key !):

if you're old enough, you can actually search for a contact using T9 typing

I never even noticed the letters below the numbers. Maybe it's because I have actually used an old school phone, with these things, it's enabled only in text fields, when composing a number to call, it does not work, typing a '3' produces a '3' and that's exactly what it is doing in the phone app - so if it's possible to use the phone keypad to search a contact, it's not obvious enough for me to use it even knowing now it's supposed to be possible !
To be complete, I have noticed that sometimes a contact list is displayed below the keypad but I have never found the magic wand that I used to display it without intending. If it was a desktop app at this point I'd press F1 to get online help...

@lduboeuf said in Tip: call a contact with one hand (secret UT key !):

it shows the contact profile even in edit mode on click, instead of filling the number

I think I understand what you mean, it seems that toucning the area above the hidden button triggers the add mode - the button with the character and a '+' is displayed in this case. However when it's not, pressing the icon or the name in the contacts list does fill the number for me.

@DJac said in Tip: call a contact with one hand (secret UT key !):

it is probably a bug.

I have not tracked when this feature was added.

The hidden button is exactly where the button to add a contact appears when the extra tiny '+' button under the '0' is pressed.

However, it's not behaving the same: when it's visible, the contacts app is entered in edit mode; when it's not, selecting a contact triggers a return to the phone app. It's as if it was intended to be displayed, but not having a different icon available and displaying the same icon in the 2 cases would be confusing, the approach has been to keep the button hidden - but still active because it's useful - even if one uses the phone with 2 hands because the button displayed at the top right, that does exactly the same thing, is also so small it's really difficult to use it.

Hello

following a recent discussion where I have argued that using a phone with one hand was not a generally useful feature, I'll make a little exception here

Since most people talk to a correspondant on their phone using one hand, it could be nice to call with one hand too. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do because most of the time, calling is really calling a known correspondant where the number is not memorized, hence the use of the contacts application: and it's very difficult to press the very small icon amid 2 other small icons in the upper right of the screen while holding the phone with the left hand. Using first the contacts application is not a good workaround since selection of a correspondant displays it and it's then necessary to press the small button at the opposite side of the screen to go to the phone app.

Here is the trick (maybe everyone knows it already ) !
There ie a secret way to open the contacts application from the phone:

touching the area to the left of the main phone green button starts the contacts app, this area is a lot more easier to thumb while holding the phone with only the left hand. It's then possible to swipe the list with the thumb, press the appropriate contact and then the phone app comes back to focus with the right number ready to call.

Honestly this looks like a bug, but it's handy once it's known.

said in Enabling MAC randomization:

I'll see how it works.

10 days later, I have not seen any problem running with Mac randomization, and I use Wifi every day.

On the 'getting the list of stations' subject, I have noticed something new: when I go to Wifi settings and there is nothing displayed (except the access point the phone is connected to, that is), if in a (ssh) console I enter

sudo iw dev wlan0 scan

the phone screen displays magically the list that was scanned. I don't know what this could mean, maybe the list is cached somewhere and sometimes the cache is stale and not refreshed automatically or it's something else. The cache hypothesis is confirmed just now, I had left displayed a list of wifi stations, left the phone rest for some time, after unlocking it the list has disappeared.

There is a wrinckle though: sometimes entering the refresh command, the reply of the command is 'scan aborted!'. This could also be what happens when it does not work. Unfortunately in both cases, the command is displayed in the system journal, but when something goes wrong nothing more is displayed. Sometimes the list vary from one execution to the next a few seconds later, but maybe it's because it's radio after all. Or there is a too short timeout. More investigation is needed (but I'm not giving up, this is only a follow-up).

Last thing: the 'scan' command has a [randomise[=<addr>/<mask>] flag, so the randomization can be at 2 levels (scan and normal use) and can not to be done at the scan level, although I don't see why this could have 2 different results on 2 configuration that seem the same. I don't even know why there are 2 levels in the Mac randomization. The only thing I know for sure is that there are some wifi hardware/firmware/driver (?) that do not support Mac randomization (because I have read it in the configuration files for the FP5) so it could be remotely possible that some configuration don't support the randomization at the scan level while supporting it for normal use.

@GooglyBear said in GPS don't seem to work on FP5 UT 24.04 stable:

a GitLab issue to follow progress for Fairphone 5

AGPS is not really linked to a specific port (even if it can work on some devices it seems, but it's mostly unintended). It's tracked here

@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.

@Escain

I have exactly this when enabling wifi; see this issue
As the fix is supposed to be in a branch more advanced than the stable one I (and you) use, my solution for now is try to not disable wifi until the software is updated.

@bbiw said in Bug report - new 24.04-1.1 release:

i have no gitlab account

the gitlab home page may lead to think that getting an account to report on existing projects is a paying feature, but it's not. Click as if you want to sign in and there is a link to register below the Connection button.