I think it's time to change your signature to "unhappily using UT" (haha).

I've been daily driving UT for about two months. I could complain about the short comings of UT. I could complain how I have to restart my phone to grab some MMS messages, or how the wifi icon just disappears sometimes but wifi button doesn't, requiring a restart. I could complain about the limited sound customization, I could complain about battery life leaving something to be desired and a camera that isn't working at its full potential and indeed a device that isn't being pushed to its full potential. I could complain how sometimes when I try to restart the screen flickers and then I have to hard restart to restart.

Then I remind myself I could still be dealing with iOS and getting messages that my cloud storage is almost full. I could still be dealing with companies and devices that DON'T ALLOW ME TO CHOOSE WHAT IS ON MY DEVICE or how I should use it OR WHAT PASSWORD I WANT TO USE! I could fill pages. And one also has to focus on the major strides that UT has made. It really has come such a long way since its inception.

There is one thing that Ubuntu Touch offers and it's the freedom to choose just as advertised.

Yes, it's far from perfect but you have to evaluate why someone would want to use UT. Some people, like me, will sacrifice almost everything at this point for the freedom that UT offers. Since I've been running UT I've never felt so free from the corporate cesspool that everyone seems to call life these days. It's literally been an invigorating experience. My mind has more space in it for more important things in life, like helping to make UT better!

Users have to keep in mind that we are limited to the vendors blobs. What would be amazing is a cheap open source device where all hardware is open source, where the drivers are well understood. Or some modular device that one could customize with whatever camera, nic, soc, etc.. they want to put in it, and drop halium all together. And then you have the carriers ripping down their own networks creating unreasonable deadlines forcing priorities onto developers. This is an uphill battle and sometimes it's a 3' brick wall with a 12" titanium plate behind it. The vendor blobs are causing a serious bottle neck in development.

Also we are a community of what... 10000? If that? I'm just guessing. This is something that isn't properly appreciated or taken into account.

Seriously take a moment to appreciate about how small that number is compared to the juggernauts. This alone should create an enlightening perspective on things.

With everything as messy as it is UT come so far and by so few. It really is something to be proud of and it feels great to be part of a community that pours its blood and sweat into giving people the "choice" and without compensation other then the satisfaction they get knowing that they are creating a choice where choice is needed. The people doing this actually care about your freedom, this cannot be measured in my eyes. Even users who don't know anything about anything still help make it better by getting involved and asking questions. By asking questions on the front-end improvements are made on the back-end. Although Telegram is suspect and I wonder why it's used but that is a whole other topic and I won't digress.

It's like being in a horse race and we've chosen a pony. Now a lot of people are betting on this pony to win the race. Some will even be disappointed when they realize half way through the race that the pony isn't going to win, that to their dismay the pony isn't performing as a horse jacked up on the best 'roids would. The expectation sounds unreasonable right? Now some of us bet on the pony because we know the pony doesn't even want to be part of the race and that it will most likely leave the track and graze the field.

In my opinion, it really comes down to philosophy; a way of life. What do we want out of life? With UT in my life I have more time to enjoy life.

I see a lot of people trying to turn their phone into a laptop. Are you just wanting to do it to say it works? Seems like a strange workflow. Wouldn't work get done more efficiently on a pc?

Spreadsheets on a phone sounds like a nightmare. Maybe I'm getting old.

@rocket2nfinity The challenge does interest me, although I'm located in Canada. Do you still have the devices?

@lduboeuf I think by the time I'm done with this I might be an expert haha. I opened an issue for telephony-service on gitlab. I'll look into making a merge request, though I hardly know what the process involves.

You seem like a one man army in here haha. Your name pops up a lot in many different places. Thanks for the effort man! I know it's a thankless job but your time is appreciated albeit by few. Thanks for looking into this.

@jojumaxx I do agree that Volla and Pinephone in particular have an obligation to their customers and are a special case. I would expect a device that has something preinstalled from the manufacturer to work flawlessly, and if it didn't I would be very disappointed. If I spent 1700 euros on devices that didn't perform as advertised I would be very upset, and I would write a letter explaining how upset I was, to *Volla or *Phinephone.

I know little about these devices as in my mind, what they offered me was simply too expensive for me and they didn't offer much more than a ported Pixel with some porting time put into it. Buying these phones was also a gamble if you considered the size of the teams working on this stuff and where UT was in development.

Keneda makes a good point saying that these devices are a first choice for the technically impaired and in my opinion are severely overpriced especially considering that problems do persist even on those phones. And it leaves a bad taste in someone's mouth knowing that the next guy bought a 3a for $40US that functions about as well as a Volla.

I did want to talk about that in my previous post but it was turning into a novel.

You are very right, this is extremely subjective. My post was very subjective and I feel in your circumstance, being a Volla owner, you have the right to be angry about these things.

I was merely highlighting that we have to keep our expectations in check and accept the reality of the situation even for the Volla and Pinephone.

In my eyes UT equates to sacrifice; freedom over functionality and performance.... for now. Maybe some day we'll have it all haha.

@lduboeuf Ok. My apologies, I was somehow working with main again. Not sure why I kept that.

Ok so I made sure to be in the right directory this time(ehem, cough).

I followed the directions you provided in the above post and the package built successfully! Thank you Iduboeuf!

I had to give writing rights to a few files which was pretty straight forward. I also noticed that my syntax was incorrect in my control file as you can see in my above post. I forgot to add a space before the <!nocheck>. It would've failed anyway I imagine.

My brain feels so much better now. I've never been happier to see a tar file! I'll mark this as solved right away.

Thank you very much for helping me with this. Considering the edits needed in the control file I think it would've taken me a lot longer to solve this on my own. I can say that I've learned a lot along way. Gitlab is new to me and there is much to learn.