UBports on pine phone?

[Kevin Kofler]

Well, yes, an SBC has less hardware to deal with and is also less of a niche product. (There are several other manufacturers of GNU/Linux SBCs, starting from the very popular Raspberry Pi.) The thing is, the PinePhone is actually very reliable as an SBC (and that is what it basically is: a version of the Pine A64 SBC with a touchscreen, an IoT modem, two cameras, and an earpiece). But people expect the touch UIs to be perfect, phone calls and SMS to work bug-free, and other things that they would never expect from an SBC. (That said, IMHO, the software quality has actually improved over the last 2 years. There are still some annoying bugs, e.g., the feature Plasma Mobile has recently introduced to allow accepting calls from the lock screen instead of requiring you to unlock it first unfortunately tends to crash the phone about every other time, but several bugs I had run into have been fixed.)

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Since this is the UBports thread, another thing to keep in mind, if you compare the PinePhone to other phones supported by Ubuntu Touch (including the ones Canonical used, by getting them shipped with Ubuntu Touch, to feature Ubuntu Touch back in the day), is that Ubuntu Touch is not the typical GNU/Linux distribution. Instead, Canonical decided to piggyback on the Android ecosystem, using Android kernels with proprietary Android drivers through the hack called libhybris that allows mixing the Android bionic libc with the GNU/Linux glibc. This hack not only restricts, e.g., upgradeability (because you can only upgrade to a newer kernel if you have matching versions of the proprietary driver blobs), but is also not supported by several of the mobile GNU/Linux components and distributions that have decided to target only mainline or close-to-mainline kernels (because they found it impractical to support two completely different stacks and decided to desupport the partly proprietary one), such as ModemManager and Plasma Mobile (components), and PostmarketOS (distribution). See https://plasma-mobile.org/2020/12/14/pla...ical-debt/ and https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Hybris. So you will have a hard time running a regular mobile GNU/Linux distribution on those phones. Ubuntu Touch is more of a hybrid between the Android and the GNU/Linux worlds, see Halium.

Conversely, porting anything that expects the Android stack, including Android itself and Ubuntu Touch, to the PinePhone with its close-to-mainline kernel (where some drivers are still maintained out-of-tree, but use the same licensing (GPLv2.0) and offer the same interfaces (APIs) as the mainline in-tree drivers) is also difficult. GloDroid and UBports are actually doing a reasonably good job considering that. They do not have all hardware working, but the same goes for GNU/Linux ports with a close-to-mainline kernel to Android phones, see, e.g., PostmarketOS's device feature matrix.