I got an orange pi 5 too and even though I'll not be running ubuntu touch on it I can give two other answers for the why:

1. Other than Mediatek Genio, rk3588 is one of the most powerful and recent (relatively speaking) boards supported by mainline linux, so this can be a real mainline linux port for ubuntu touch.
2. https://liberux.net/ is trying to build the liberux nexx phone based on an rk3588s board. It's not going to be exactly the same as orange pi 5 but it will only be a small step from there.

@kugiigi Mouse Button 8 is usually mapped to Back, Mouse Button 9 to Forward. Here on desktop plasma wayland, in a quick test Firefox, Thunderbird, Dolphin and Kate do something with it. I wouldn't know if emulating those events would be a good idea, or if encouraging apps to respect it would set a bad precedent that everyone will regret in the future though.

I also tried connecting a usb mouse to Ubuntu Touch. It looks like those mouse buttons are not mapped at all, at least none of the apps react to it, including firefox(xmir)

@UBportsNews Is there any place to follow the mir2 and wayland progress? Because I see many related issues on the gitlab but most have not been updated in months.

The background is that I tried postmarketOS with plasma mobile on a Shift 6mq recently and there are many native linux apps already that have a working mobile interface with wayland and it would really be useful for Ubuntu Touch if you could run them here too. So part 2 of the question is: Is there an effort for libertine to support those apps with full wayland and is there a place where we can follow this more closely? (Example: gnome-calls for SIP feels like a proper mobile app on postmarketOS but on Ubuntu Touch in libertine the UI isn't functional at all).

@UBportsNews ubfortunately still doesn't support gps, does it?

I think not many people know that there is an nlnet https://nlnet.nl/project/Firefox-linuxmobile/ and EU NGI https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/enhancing-firefox-for-linux-on-mobile/ funded project to improve firefox for mobile linux. There's not a lot of info on those websites but it looks like developers for postmarketOS are working on this https://postmarketos.org/blog/2024/11/04/pmOS-update-2024-10/.

Danny will be able to improve mobile-config-firefox and replace hacks we currently carry there to make the desktop version of Firefox work on mobile, with proper solutions in upstream Firefox. See Enhancing Firefox for Linux on Mobile for details. Milestones have been created and will be filled with related issues and merge requests.

1. The small UX problems have been mentioned, but I think the biggest one is that quite often the touchscreen input mapping breaks. I think it happens especially after an accidental drag & drop trigger, on an image on a website, or on a tab. Then there is a good chance that either a) one touch input seems to be stuck so if you try to just scroll down with one touch, it does a pinch zoom instead, or b) the touch input is clamped to a part of the screen and you don't have touch input outside of that area. This is probably related to the landscape mode issue, but this is easily triggerable even when the phone is in portrait mode and rotation is disabled. I'm not sure you can do much about that, but it is a real issue because the only way to get proper input back I found so far is killing the app and restarting it.

2. This applies to bluetooth audio and usb audio (the latter apparently works now). It does NOT happen with built in speakers: Firefox likes to control the global volume. Example: Play any audio (e.g. https://radiomii.com/ or any app). Go to youtube in uWolf and start a video. Bam, 100% volume blasting your ears.

Not sure if MOZ_DISABLE_PULSEAUDIO=1 is really a thing (only 1 google result from last month?) but I tried os.environ["MOZ_DISABLE_PULSEAUDIO"] = "1" and it doesn't make a difference. I tried that because I assume the issue is with how firefox creates a separate stream for every tab/media.

In about:config I only saw media.default_volume but not even that seems to do anything about this behavior.

Does anyone know if there would be a way to make firefox behave?

@UBportsNews

USB-C headset support is now also enabled on 20.04 series as well.

Wait, this was implemented at all? None of the gitlab issues I subscribed to were updated https://forums.ubports.com/topic/10831/usb-audio-devices-don-t-provide-any-output/6

But I tried it and plugged in USB-C headphones on Volla Quintus with 24.04-1 and sound actually switches to them now. Awesome.

(To be clear, this is for USB-C devices with an USB DAC, and not analog passthrough over USB-C - those have longer been working)

My hope for real wayland support is that it improves not rendering stuff when idle.

Currently when I run uWolf and power off the screen (even when I focus another app), lomiri permanently uses 30-40% cpu and pulseaudio 15%.

This makes the phone a nice pocket warmer, but also sucks the battery pretty fast.

Or currently, might there be a way to tell firefox to drop its rendering while the screen is off or another app is focused, like maybe "minimizing" it in xwayland?

@naz.R same in uwolf

To answer my own question, yes it still works on Noble as it did on Focal.

As a side note, I feel like I saw GPS (google maps web) working once, but currently it's definitely not working. Do we know what it would take to get it working?

@Ian Thanks, but the command didn't seem to do much. After checking updates again just now, I did get the update though, so all good for me now.

@UBportsNews Huge thanks to everyone involved. I'm not offered the Upgrade on Volla Quintus with OTA-10 yet, is this update also rolled out with delays for random users and if so, is there a way to trigger the update immediately?

@kristatos Got my answer in the 20.04 OTA 10 blog post https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/ubuntu-touch-20-04-ota-10-release-3972

tl:dr: Held back until some boot failures are solved.

So... has it been released? I haven't seen any news.

@Ida_ Ugh it started working again after restarting the phone. I didn't see any obvious errors in journalct or the output of /opt/click.ubuntu.com/uwolf.chromiumos-guy/current/librewolf.sh, not sure what the problem was, but a reboot fixed it.

Does it still start for anyone after the latest update (on 20.04)?

@ChromiumOS-Guy No rush of course but can you say a few words about noble? I don't see any commits relating to it yet, so I assume a real wayland port is not done yet? Do we know if the current state still works on noble? Thanks.

Not the only one. I was also surprised plugging in my usb-c headphones did nothing.

Generally it should be noted that this is about headphones with an usb dac. There are also adapters and headphones that pass through analog audio over the usb-c connectors, and those apparently work.

These are the open issues that have been reported so far:

https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/packaging/usb-moded/-/issues/6

https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/ubuntu-touch/-/issues/1912

https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/reference-device-ports/halium13/volla-phone-quintus/volla-algiz/-/issues/3