Best posts made by Mark

After a long time with not much change we got a new face on the Telegram group with a far better understanding of how to get things done than I have. The result is that Apparmor and other important things now work "out of the box" when you flash a new UT image to the SD card. If you have a Pi3 sitting about and an SD card available this might be a good time to give it another try. If anyone wants to test it out and tell us what is working and what is still buggy (hopefully accompanied by suggestions on how to fix it) feel free.

@nero355 I can't speak for everyone but for me the main reasons are

• having something inexpensive and ARM based to develop and test apps on

• keep the original convergence idea alive

• potentially open up UT to some of the millions of people who use the Raspberry Pi

• because I have been using Ubuntu Touch since I bought my BQ phone new with it preinstalled all those years ago and I like the idea of being able to use it and its range of apps with a monitor, keyboard and mouse

I'm writing this on Ubuntu Touch running on a Raspberry Pi 3 using the OSK on the Pi 7" touchscreen.
Thanks for the hard work put in. There are some issues still of course. Something odd with the graphics in Pi 4 windows and a slight overlap on the touch screen making left or right swipes tricky but this feels so much closer to useable than the first image. I don't think it is too far now from a platform that will showcase convergence and perhaps even let us develop apps live. I appreciate this is a side project so the UBports developers can't make it a high priority. Hopefully though the work done will help towards getting other Arm64 non-Android ports running smoothly. As a long term Linux user - trying to help get Unity8 or UBports working on the Pi has been very humbling - I'd no idea how little I knew/know!

Re: Continuation of rpi effort and how to test
There was a mouse hover event bug that has been fixed upstream making selection with mouse and keyboard a vastly better experience - not perfect yet but much more useable. Worth trying again if you found it too frustrating before.
Wifi is now working on the Pi 3 and Pi 4. We are trying to sort out sound and Bluetooth - any help welcome.
Due to the pinephone and other arm64 devices most apps are available and have been updated to work.
One continuing bug seems related to content hub and Apparmor not working. This means that copying files or pictures between apps is not working (and leads to crashes at times).
Another cause of crashes seems to be related to windows on the screen. Try not to move or change size when a window is rendering and windows rendering over other windows can also cause problems.
The Pi has not got much ram so running multiple browser tabs and/or too many apps at once will lead to problems.
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blog-1/post/raspberry-pi-266
https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/raspberrypi
https://t.me/UBports_pi

Is there a place where UT progress and dead ends with the Pinephone are being documented? I find there is so much posted in the Pinephone group on Telegram and a lot of it is not UT specific so I don't follow it as much as I should. I'd still like to know more and try to apply it to the Pi.

@advocatux Thanks - oh and apologies for re-opening a too old thread elsewhere

I realised that that post may look like I'm claiming some credit and that would be wrong.
Early on I did some blundering about in the dark and kept posting about my inevitable failures to encourage someone who knew what they were doing to help - that is the sum total of my contribution

@Flohack I have now updated the readme in a similar style to the Pinephone one and put in a merge request. Apologies if I've not followed the correct procedure - Gitlab is still new to me.

Way back in the Canonical days I bought a BQ E4.5. When support was dropped some functionality was initially lost but now, under UBports and the community, the development and functionality of Ubuntu Touch and its apps is very much improved. Any thoughts on how far Ubuntu Touch has come in the last 5 years and how much further we may get in the next 5?

@kugiigi The Pi3 is never likely to perform better than my BQ E4.5 due to the low memory and other spec but the BQ still (well for another few weeks anyway) does most things on UT pretty well considering. I'd be interested to know what aspects led you to thinking it was unuseable. It can certainly be awkward to use in some situations but with a few more folk looking into the issues most minor issues can probably be solved or their impact reduced. Even I would admit that it was next to impossible before we got the mouse hover event bug sorted. There were tricks that let you select things but you wouldn't have recommended it to a friend.

@thousandtopics as it is already working on the Pi 3 (not working perfectly of course) he should manage to avoid eating a sock this time around.

@ra Thanks for the feedback. I have found that Morph on UT tends to work better than Chromium on PiOs on the Pi3 and trying to run (non Touch) Ubuntu on the Pi3 was slower and buggier than running UT. I agree that UT running on the 2 or 4GB Pi4 will make for a far better user experience though.