Ubuntu Touch on the Pinephone - is this the best Linux mobile interface?


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I already covered Phosh, the mobile port of GNOME, and Plasma Mobile, both running on the pinephone. Now it's time to take a look at the other main alternative for mobile Linux interfaces, the one that has been around for a while now: Ubuntu Touch, or Lomiri. Let's take a look at how well it runs

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This shell is based on gestures starting from the screen edges. A short swipe from left to right will bring a launcher with the default applications pinned to it, and your current open applications as well, appearing on top of the pinned shortcuts.
A longer swipe from the left edge will bring the whole list of applications.

If you swipe from the right towards the left in a short motion, you'll switch to the next open app. If you make a long swipe from the right edge, then you'll get to a multitasking view, with apps displayed in a 3D layout.

You can swipe an app's card up to close it, or tap an app to resume it.

Finally, a swipe from the top edge of the screen will bring the notifications, and the quick settings, which don't display as on most other operating systems: they're in a straight line, that you can scroll from left to right, and tap each icon to get to a quick few shortcuts, like enabling or disabling a specific feature, or dive deeper into the settings.

The Applications


Out of the box, you get a nice calculator that handles rotation beautifully to display more options, and lets you swipe from the bottom in portrait to still get access to these options. The default calendar app looks good, with an Agenda view that shows your various events in order, a day, week, month, and year view.

I won't dwell on the camera app, as support for the pinephone camera is still in its infancy, it's rare that it even displays an image.

The Clock application lets you add various clocks from all around the world, start a timer, or use a stopwatch. Swiping from the bottom in the "clock" tab lets you create alarms, although I would have preferred alarms to be a full tab in the app instead of hiding that behind a swipe.

The contacts app does what you'd expect, list your contacts and allow to set some as favorites and you can swipe from the bottom to create a new one. The file manager looks good, although it's a bit slow to start, and lets you create files, and change how the directories look.

The messaging app works as you'd expect, letting you type messages and send them to your contacts. You can also swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen to start a new message.

The web browser is alright, if a bit slow to start.It lets you pick your search engine and homepage, and display web pages in desktop mode, but there are no sync capabilities for history, bookmarks, or passwords, so it's not going to be fantastic to use.

There is also a terminal app that looks really good and has quick aliases in the bottom left corner. The Notes app is also pretty competent, letting you swipe up from the bottom to create a new note, and syncs with evernote.

This leaves us with the phone dialer, letting you pick a contact, or just type the number you want to call, and the weather app, which is really black and white and pretty spartan, and it reminds me of a windows phone app.

The Settings


The settings page uses a sensible icon grid.

Ubuntu Touch is pretty barebones in that regard: in terms of customization, you can change the wallpaper, the ringtone for calls and messages, and that's about it. A few apps let you switch to a dark mode in the settings, and some offer to respect a "system preference", but that's not something I could find in the settings.

The AppStore


The OpenStore serves as the App Store for Ubuntu Touch. It's not a package manager like you could find on other Mobile Linux alternatives: no way to download a desktop program here, at least not graphically.

You'll get apps that were made specifically for ubuntu touch, and there are around 400 of these in total.
You can also get a few Matrix clients, and a nice email client called Dekko 2, among other applications.

Updates are handled in the system settings, with over the air updates for the system itself, and for the apps, grouped at the same place.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

#DigitalSovereignty is at the top of the political agenda, finally, that's good. But strange things (or not so much) are happening.

Like this one: The Luxembourg gov is moving to Google Distributed Cloud, see datacenterdynamics.com/en/news… and it is framed as "sovereign".

The Dutch minister for Digital Affairs (outgoing) is so inspired and might follow.

But wait a minute: a managed cloud service by Google, how much sovereignty does that give to you?

Seems more like a case of #SovereigntyWashing

in reply to Wouter Tebbens

About Google Sovereign Cloud, and Distributed Cloud hosting:
"giving customers flexibility and choice",

-> yes, of course, but always dependent on Google HQ, and the Capitol.

cloud.google.com/sovereign-clo…

in reply to Wouter Tebbens

What happened to the ICC - being blocked by Microsoft at Trump's orders - can happen as much with these sovereignwashing clouds from Google, isn't it?

If you didn't read about the ICC being cut of from their email and cloud, read this: techzine.eu/news/privacy-compl…

For many years, several of my colleagues, a few ex-students, and at least one former romantic interest have fervently hoped that I would become an extinguished professor.

Their prayers were for naught. I outlasted them.

cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/20…

The parent company of the Big 4 sewing pattern brands (Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls, and Vogue) has been sold to a liquidator
craftindustryalliance.org/pare…
#sewing

gettr.com/post/p3lud7a6540

WOW! Has anyone seen this? Nancy Pelosi on the Phone talking about the Blocking of the National Guard on Jan 6.

A Lot Of These Security Videos Were Seen Right After J6 2021 But Were Blocked From Most People Seeing It!
My Personal Opinion Pelosi Setup The Whole J6 Event ! She Wanted To Finish Trump Off !

Byrd Who Was Her Personal Security Supervisor When She Was Inside The Capital I Believe Was Told By Pelosi To Shoot Someone So They Could Blame Trump For It!

in reply to HunDriverWidow

And Security Video Shows Byrd Walking The Long Corridors Texting The Whole Time From The Other End Of The Capital And Just Walked Up There To Shoot Turned Out To Be Ashli Unarmed Who Even Had 3 Capital Police On Both Sides Of Her With There Long Guns Hanging Off There Shoulders ! There Was Nothing Going On !

And Mayor Bowser Was In On It !
She Ran The DC Prison Where She Said She Would Make Those J6 Prisoners Wish They Never Came To DC !
And We Saw The Abuse ! That Was Bowser !

We're in the process of scanning 48 bankers boxes of the MIT MULTICS archive. We'd like to get a decent high speed document scanner to make this process go easier. Can you help us with a donation? sdf.org

Once the scanning is complete all of these will be made available online for everyone.

#archiving #scanning #documentation #archive #mit

Teddy Roosevelt Jr.: Son of the Rough Rider and a Hero at Normandy

breitbart.com/politics/2025/06…

in reply to Parker Higgins

I wrote up some thoughts about how this site came together and what we get out of different data visualizations. For a long time I've been resistant to building web stuff, and I think that might have finally broken parkerhiggins.net/2025/06/new-…

NEW: An Italian parliament inquiry concluded that the Italian government used Paragon's spyware to hack activists working to rescue immigrants.

The committee, however, said it did not find any evidence that Italy's intelligence agencies (nor anyone else) spied on journalist Francesco Cancellato.

The report leaves a this, and other, key questions unanswered.

techcrunch.com/2025/06/06/ital…

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I've been away from my normal routine for a week and getting back to even some of it just feels super weird. everyone can do their part to help make everybody's weekend just a little more predictable. Have a good weekend.

Image credit: Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, on Flickr Commons
flic.kr/p/p6aVgN

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers, increasingly using artificial intelligence, are getting entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org, a labor rights nonprofit based in New York.

restofworld.org/2025/employee-…

Talking Heads release the first official video for 'Psycho Killer'

openculture.com/2025/06/talkin…

#music #TalkingHeads

Every time I see estimated costs for Trump's birthday parade, and $15m of the budget is allocated for road repairs afterward, I wonder about the gullibility of both the people putting together these estimates and those reporting on it

So, a quick poll

The damaged roads in DC will be repaired:

  • before the end of the year (0%, 0 votes)
  • before the end of Trump's term (0%, 0 votes)
  • lol (100%, 62 votes)
62 voters. Poll end: 2 months ago

in reply to woodland creature

They have shitty sleep because their own jowls choke them at night. So much of life is out of bounds to them because they can't move properly. They simply choose to "live" this way.

It is very strange.

I know people who are slowly drinking themselves to death. Bad teeth from sugary alcohol. They're probably on the fast track to alzheimer's. This is preferred over... life? Reality? It's almost like these people— extremely well-to-do sportsball fans and system-believers— are burdened by some vague consciousness of what we "wrongthinkers" know, but can never acknowledge.

Like they have some suspicion that the future is an ugly place, not worth showing up to. :cirnoShrug:

#BlenderStudio is looking for a composer for their new short film project. Is this an opportunity for #BonkWave or #NotBonkWave to be in a soundtrack?

studio.blender.org/projects/si…

Israel arms ISIS-jihadists to fight against Hamas just like they armed Hamas to fight against the PFLP.

You may ask yourself “when will they ever learn?” but that's assuming the Israeli government's goal is to live in peace. Why should they need to learn, when arming terrorist groups that destabilize and escalate this conflict isn't a mistake?

Considering how much genocide, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism and hence the expansion of their borders they have been able to justify due to hamas; considering their main argument behind stopping the entry of humanitarian aid was because they were sometimes raided by terrorist militias, which as it now turns out they funded, it was a worthy investment.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

@unknownpseudoartist we both put out music with cats. you and i understand the internet 😛
i also like that you have your own site! im at work but got a tab open for you. ill be checking out your tunes when i get home!

also, you should check out indieart.support and shout out with your artist details @hello to get on the directory!

in reply to Unknown Pseudoartist

so im inclined to scold you for all your self-deprecation but then i would be a hypocrite. but i do like this part:

"Basically this is that kind of music you'd expect to find in a random MySpace or Soundclick profile in the 2000s. That kind of thing you'd get 128k MP3 downloads in a static HTML site. That kind of stuff that would normally be done by some passionate young person who just discovered they can do cool stuff to share online in a cyberworld full of people willing to discover and listen more random, creepy stuff like this. "

and i think you'll find plenty of company around here. especially as a #caturday-er.

anyways, you do a really good job with bass sounds. the overall tonal quality and just getting bass synth sounds. often times better than actual bass guitar but let's not awaken the bassists, right? i aint tryna die right before the weekend.
favorite track on the placeholder of something... i think gotta be absurd. ill check out the other album after this last listen.

in reply to benda

hey thanks a lot for listening! this means a lot to me ❤️ (even if I don't agree with my fake bass sounding any better than real bass haha)

Regarding the self-deprecant comments... well, it's complicated, but let's say I was in a bad time and dealing with a bad situation in certain communities regarding harsh criticism and I was tired of that, and just felt the need to break with that and go more my way without any pressure. Feeling a lot better about that already, so no worries 😀

in reply to Unknown Pseudoartist

thats good to hear. theres a lot of pressure from our economic and societal systems to make the creation of art something that turns a profit, or needing to be a certain amount of prolific. all nonsense. the point of making art is the part where you are making it. that journey, that mindset. the best therapy, imho (or at least thats what i keep telling myself bc hell no i;m not paying for therapy lol).
in reply to benda

heck yeah! Couldn't agree more. In fact sometimes it's not even about economic stuff but more like some folks pretending to be Yngwie Malsteen (even when Yngwie seems to be not that arrongant anymore haha), or obsessing on production/mixing (which can be kinda elitistic, since oftentimes that's more a matter of money and expensive tools rather than simply doing stuff). Art should be more about having fun and expressing things, not about bratting or obsessing on getting better at it!
in reply to benda

and yeah, I like the idea behind the paragraph you quoted! I can't say I was a huge fan of everything that was done in the internet in the mid-late 2000s, and it wasn't the greatest times for many people (too much of bigot bullsh*t, you know). But when it comes to art and creatives stuff, definitively missing that special charm and the prominence of more amateur-ish attitude, in the best way. I just love the underground side of music and art 😀 and it's a pity some of that got lost.

It’s easier to understand conservatives when you realize that they operate on a system of vertical morality while we operate on a system of horizontal morality. In a system of horizontal morality, something is right or wrong based on whether it causes harm, violates consent, etc regardless of the social status or class of an individual. In a system of vertical morality something is right or wrong based solely on whether an authority figure says so or not
in reply to Danielle Foré

This is why they say things like, “without god what’s to stop you from going around murdering and raping?” In their system of morality, those things are only bad because an authority said they were bad. And when the authority says they are okay, they’re okay. Which looks inconsistent to us, but makes perfect sense to them.

This is why they also think that abolishing the police would result in the purge for example. They can’t conceptualize morality independent from authority

in reply to Danielle Foré

So when you wonder, “How can they flip flop on liking Elon?” It’s easy: Elon is good when their authority tells them he is good and he’s bad when the authority tells them he is bad. It doesn’t matter that Trump is a rapist or a cheat or racist or anything else, because the authority said he is good. That is the only requirement. Everything is built on appeal to authority

So some Democratic politicians actually got the memo, but clearly others are flailing. To help them out, I’d like to offer my sage political wisdom. Try the following message:

1. Kick Trump out.
2. Tax the living shit out of billionaires.
3. Use the money to get folks back on their feet and clean up this mess.

Just that. Simple and direct, no fussing around. Give that a try and see how it lands. Float a trial balloon in some minor swing district election and see what happens.

tried watching a restream of the game fes bullshit show

couldn't last more than 5 minutes before an illogical discomfort and rage took handle of me so i decided to stop

i don't think i can ever go back to watching those shitshows tbh
not now knowing that majority of it is slop(with denuvo mind you) if not outright subversive leftoid shit

Lots of talk today about having more apps than users on Nostr with the rise of vibe coding. What if I told you... that's the strategy? 👀

From the #OsloFreedomForum last week:

youtube.com/watch?v=XOeWLSLGwj…

My frens @mk and @alex
RT: mostr.pub/objects/8fe2022c3735…


Lots of talk today about having more apps than users on Nostr with the rise of vibe coding. What if I told you... that's the strategy? 👀

From the #OsloFreedomForum last week:

youtube.com/watch?v=XOeWLSLGwj…


Occasional renewal of the prediction that Trump will not finish his term, and I think it's even plausible he'll be out by the midterms.

The current situation is unsustainable, even for the people who are benefiting most from it. Those people will, of course, try to keep him in place as long as they can, but it's a losing battle. With a lot of ugly tradeoffs in the meantime.

Sadly, Dem leadership are among the ones who believe they benefit. They don't even try to hide it. Schumer and Jeffries, like the fash faction and theocrat faction, want to keep Donny Littlehands in the Oval Office as long as possible, because they think that's what's best for them. Lesser techbros will start turning on Trump now, with Musk and Thiel paying the bills, but they can't do much harm without getting hurt back. And the bigger techbros (Goog, MS, FB, Apple, Amazon) are basically part of the Big Bidness faction. That faction isn't going to defect until the very very last minute.

BTW if you want to be horrified go look for Jeffries's response when a journalist asked if he was planning to do anything about Trump having crossed Jeffries's "red line" of congressional arrests. When I say he'll be much worse than Pelosi that's what I mean. Pelosi was good at procedure and knew how to use money to whip. The only things Jeffries is good at are passing the buck and reassuring donors.

That means the rest of us just have to hope we survive, and that midterms don't get derailed by a terrorist attack, and Trump doesn't get martyred in a way that cements GOP power, or any of a dozen other obvious that could wreck the possibility of Dems regaining control of one or both chambers.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

fyi all you tech bros salivating over some kind of "ai assistant" that's intelligent enough to understand you and act on your desires, but for some reason doesn't need to be treated with respect or be given any sort of compensation at all...

hate to break it to you but you're reinventing something again, and it's definitely not something good

Been off my anti depressants since April now and now I feel like I've reached a state of craziness. I've developed an unhealthy obsession with someone (who hopefully doesn't know, but I did send a Facebook request), and am not sleeping at night. If I don't work through this over the weekend, I'm afraid it is back to the Zoloft for me.

Keep checking my fb to see if the request is accepted, and I'm guessing it will not be. Keep checking said persons active status on Teams at work. Keep trying to walk past said person. I am a psycho.

Also in the strangest coincidence, when I tried messaging said person at work, it actually failed to go through. You can't block internal people so that was fucking weird.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

theconservativetreehouse.com/b…

The Denali Puppy Camera is back in operation for the 2025 season (Denali National Park and Preserve). Image credit National Park Service and Alaska Geographic. Learn more at #nps #nationalparks #interpretation #alaska #publiclands #photography #landscapephotography #denali #sleddog #sleddogs #travel #mushing #puppycam and nps.gov/dena/index.htm and nps.gov/dena/learn/photosmulti… and nps.gov/dena/learn/photosmulti… #sca (Student Conservation Association)
in reply to benda

@notype
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…

If the g flag is not used, only the first complete match and its related capturing groups are returned.


It returns the first match (which is aabb) and its capturing groups, which in this case are (aa) (matching "aa") and (bb) (matching "bb").

in reply to no type

@notype @barubary well im a third of the way through the course, the lesson is on regex, although they already covered /regex/g and /regex/i in a earlier lesson. it doesnt seem to complicated for where i am at right now, its just they didn't really explain it. just threw it out there along with a method that they didn't teach me either. that's what really threw me off is i didn't realize the .match() method was also returning the search elements.
in reply to benda

@notype @barubary I came at this a different way, and wondered what the heck the /d modifier is doing. Turns out:

1) W3schools is completely wrong about what it does (shocker, I know 🙄); and
2) All it does is add a particular extra bit of information to the return value.

I'm getting my info from stackoverflow.com/a/73947884, to which I am greatly indebted, and major props to SO user Andrejs. I reproduced their work with the text and RE under consideration here. 1/2

in reply to benda

i got my regex introduction from the perl book. simple, no-nonsense: perldoc.perl.org/perlre

here's another classic book, though more hefty: regex.info/book.html

whatever you do with these old documents, skip over the software specifics (which are outdated) & go directly to the regex syntax (which has barely changed since).

Norm Eisen Announces He Is Going After Elon Musk – This Is What Happens When You Have a Weak AG Like Pam Bondi Who Should Have Indicted Him Months Ago

thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/n…

How it should have been:

Xorg and Wayland competing with one another to be the best. People choosing whatever they like like.

What's really happening:

Intentionally not merging pull requests that improve xorg. Closing merge requests and issues en mass. Apps dropping support for xorg and forcing people to use wayland.

Instead of "let the best person win", it's "let me win".

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to dobó istván

@istvan @bonifartius Support for more than 4GiB of memory on a system that runs many programs is necessary - after all a computer with the power to run 40,000 programs at the same time cannot do so if there is a 4GiB memory limit.

Although that can be achieved even on a 32 bit processor with nasty hacks, such kind of cruft is best avoided.

The x86 instruction set and the way arguments are passed is horrible - the AMD64 instruction set solves many of the issues and is quite pleasant in comparison.

The X32 ABI may be of interest to you, as that is mostly 64bit, except with 32bit pointers - meaning the AMD64 semantics can be used, but programs are limited to 4GiB of memory (but you can also run specialized software that needs more memory than that with 64 bit pointers too).

judicialwatch.org/4-975-millio…