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

Hey everyone and today we're going to talk about Ubuntu Touch. I already covered Phosh and KDPlasma Mobile but Ubuntu Touch has been around for a long while in the very niche market of Linux mobile desktops. So I think it's time we took a look at the granddaddy of these interfaces. But first we're going to hear a message from our sponsor. So this video is sponsored by Skillshare. Most of you probably know about it. Skillshare is an online learning community that lets you perfect one of your hobbies, one of the things you already know or just grab some more professional knowledge of various topics. Now if we talk about Linux specifically there are tons of courses about how to get better at the Linux command line, how to get better at being a Linux sysadmin, there's ton of things here that you could use to better your knowledge of the Linux space. Now me personally I focus more on trying to make better videos, better sound, better lighting and this means that I have been focusing lately on the latest course by MKBHD on how to make better videos. It's a really interesting one and I think if you want to learn how to make videos it's a really good one to try and look at. So of course creating your account on Skillshare is free but if you subscribe to the premium version you'll get access to offline courses and also to the whole library of everything that you can watch or ever want to watch. So the first 1000 subscribers that click the link in the description below will get access to a free trial of Skillshare premium and after that it's less than $10 a month for the access to the whole library. So get to the description, click on the link and start learning something new. Okay so now about Ubuntu Touch. It's a project that is almost 10 years old. It was started in October 2011 as an official Ubuntu project. It wasn't a third-party derivative. Now it went on its little way trying to focus more on getting more manufacturers on board, trying to ship to manufacturers in 2014, three years after it was started and there was also the infamous failed Ubuntu phone kickstarter crowdfunding campaign which unfortunately didn't see the light of day but it was kind of close and after that Ubuntu and Canonical just kind of lost interest until in 2017 they felt there was no market pull towards this thing and they canned it as an official project. Now fortunately the UbiPorts foundation grabbed it and kept updating it and making it better and better and is still managed by that foundation to that day and it has a nice sizeable community behind it. Now I tried Ubuntu Touch on the Pine phone with the official stable builds that they release on their website. It works really well. I didn't switch to the kernel update branch which is a branch that supposedly brings more performance and makes the camera a little bit more usable because when I tried it, it crashed a lot of various apps so I stayed to the stable branch. Ubuntu Touch uses the Unity 8 shell. It's an evolution and probably a complete rewrite of what was Unity 7 that you probably used or heard of. It was the default desktop environment for Ubuntu for a long time before they moved back to number 3. Now Unity 8 is now called Lomiri because they wanted to avoid confusion with other projects named Unity which is understandable. So the shell itself is pretty nice to use. It's based on gestures starting from the screen edges. A short swipe from left to right will bring a and your current open apps as well appearing on top of the shortcuts. If you long press one of these, you can pin it or unpin it. A longer swipe from the left edge will bring the whole list of applications displayed as a grid where a single tap will open the app. If you swipe from the right towards the left in a short motion, you'll switch to the next open app and that is actually a super useful and super fast gesture to use. Recently open apps just fly in. 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. Now again, this is super fast and super smooth compared to the other mobile alternatives like Phosh or KD Plasma Mobile. Now 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 you can tap each icon to get to a quick few shortcuts like enabling or disabling a specific feature or dive deeper into the settings. Once you've pulled down the notification shade, if you hold it, you can also swipe left and right to quickly switch toggles without having to tap on them which is pretty handy. Now here again, it's pretty fast and fluid although I'm not sure that the screen space usage is all that great. Having just one line of quick toggles and the rest of the screen completely blank with no information whatsoever or only the two or three options that you can show by clicking on those quick toggles, it's probably not the most efficient use of your screen space but it's innovative and it's actually not that bad in terms of usability. Now the shell itself is really great to use. The gestures take about 10 minutes to get used to but once that's the case, it's just a more natural and more normal way to navigate a phone. Just using the screen edges to zip through the launcher, through the recent open apps and through the notification shade is just very intuitive, very simple and I like it. Now Ubuntu Touch ships a respectable number of default apps. As most other alternatives, it's lacking a default email client but there are options in the store, we'll see about that in a bit. So out of the box, you get a nice calculator that handles rotation beautifully to display more options and lets you swipe from the bottom when you're in portrait mode to still get access to these options. The default calendar app looks good with an agenda view that shows your various events in order and there's also 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 and when it does, the viewfinder is extremely slow and out of focus. It's basically unusable as is the camera app of every other Linux mobile distribution that I tried on the PinePhone. Now 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. You also get a bunch of preferences for alarms with volumes, snoozing delay or vibration. The contacts app does what you'd expect, listing your contacts and allowing you to set some as favorites and you can also 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. Only issue here is that if you try to copy paste something, the file manager will crash and take the whole phone with it so it's basically not that usable at all except for maybe navigating your files but you can't really move them around. And that brings us to the gallery application, the music player and the video media player which I'm pretty sure are really good but I couldn't use them because there was no way for me to get any media onto that phone. Basically trying to plug in the Pine phone with Ubuntu Touch didn't show it up as an external media device so I couldn't just copy paste stuff on it. ADB shell wouldn't recognize it either and when I tried to download stuff from my Nextcloud, from my Nextcloud public share link, it saved it in the downloads folder but when I tried to copy paste them to other folders it crashed the whole phone so basically there was no way for me to add music or to add pictures or videos so there we go. Now 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 home page and also 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. Fortunately it loads pages pretty fast and is reasonably responsive in use. A swipe from the bottom lets you switch tabs or open a new one. There's also a terminal app that looks really good and has quick aliases in the bottom left corner which should make typing commands a bit faster for people who are inclined to use a terminal on their phone which I'm not. The notes app is also pretty competent and syncs with Evernote although there doesn't seem to be any next cloud sync available here which is unfortunate and this leaves us with the phone dialer which is pretty simple 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 which is not necessarily a bad thing. Now all these apps look and feel pretty good they are all coherent in terms of look and feel in terms of how you navigate them and they all make the same horrible heresy that in 2021 you would have the back button in the top left corner. Now screens have gotten big and your thumbs haven't gotten bigger at least not mine and so I can't reach this back button with one hand I need to switch my grip on the phone and that's just not something you should do so the back button should be either on the bottom left or it should be an edge swipe away but generally the experience is really good. All the applications look and feel like they were designed with the same purpose in mind with the same team behind them the shell is zippy it's fast the applications load relatively quickly for the pine phone's hardware it just works well and it's nice to use a system that feels coherent and well designed from the beginning it's all top-notch working. Now the settings page uses a sensible icon grid instead of the terrible list of options that iOS and Android have made popular and I really love that it makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for you don't have to scroll through a whole list of stuff with super tiny icons now you can really pick and choose what you want you can really see what you're going to have when you click on an icon it's much much better. But in terms of settings Ubuntu Touch is pretty bare bones in terms of customization you can change the wallpaper the ringtone for calls and messages and that's about it. A few apps lets you switch to a dark mode in their settings and some offer to respect a system preference but that's not something I could find in the settings at all there doesn't seem to be a global preference for dark mode here now you can change how the keyboard looks though with multiple themes available as well as a whole bunch of options to make sure that typing will be as close to what you want as possible a vibration doesn't seem to be supported for Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone yet so I couldn't try that and that's a bummer but yeah the PinePhone is not completely ready to be used with any mobile distribution so I'm not gonna hold that against Ubuntu Touch. So the big problem in the settings is mainly due to bugs there is an accounts page that would let you sync with the outside you could set up a Nextcloud account a Gmail account or an own cloud account but the problem is when you type on that it just does nothing it spins in the air for no well-explained reason and it never asks you to log into anything which means that Ubuntu Phone as of now lives in a microcosm of itself and you can't sync it with anything else at least not in my case on the PinePhone which is too bad because that makes it completely unusable for me I need my phone to sync with the calendars the contacts the notes basically everything that I use it needs to be synced with my desktop or I can't use that phone basically there are all a few bugs here and there that makes the experience really not that great which is too bad because Ubuntu Touch looks professional feels coherent feels well designed and is really fluid and responsive so if they could just put some fixes on those small bugs it would really make the experience a top-notch level now the open store serves as the app store for Ubuntu Touch it is not a package manager like you could find on other mobile Linux alternatives there is no way to download a desktop program here at least not through the store so you will get apps that were made specifically for Ubuntu Touch and there are around 400 of these in total now you don't move to a Linux powered phone because you want the most applications available out there you use it because you want to get away from the big tech corporations because you want to tinker with your phone or just because you want to use Linux on everything and Android isn't really Linux so generally you shouldn't be too bothered by the fact that there are many apps especially since in the 400 apps available most of them are unofficial web apps which lets you get access to most websites that people would want to use on their phones that's also where you can get a nice email client called Deca2 among other applications this email client should really be the default it works really well it's it looks nice the interface is really well integrated it's just a good experience the open store itself doesn't handle the updates they're handled in the system settings with app updates and over-the-air updates for the system itself they're all grouped in the same place which is fine and well the open store experience isn't bad you can search you can install you can basically do anything that you would want to do on a on a store on a phone the thing is you know using the open store that what you install is going to be fitted to your device's screen which is a big plus compared to plasma mobile and phosh which will let you figure out by yourself which apps are compatible with the phone and which will display in a weird way i really like the approach of ubuntu touch here restrict the number of apps that are available but make sure that these are all at least passable experiences instead of having the unfortunate surprise of installing something and realize that it's never going to work on your phone so you have to uninstall it and look for another alternative it's just it's just a pain so yeah the open store experience is pretty good as well now to conclude on ubuntu touch i really like what i'm seeing it's way closer to being used as a daily driver than phosh or kd plasma mobile at least in my opinion and that's understandable it has been in development for far longer the animations feel really fast and fluid the shell gestures really make the experience a lot simpler and a lot nicer to use than the other alternatives and yeah it just looks good it looks coherent it looks nice it has a simple white and black theme with a few accent colors it's just a pleasure to use and probably it's due to the fact that it's fast and fluid which phosh and plasma mobile really aren't on the pine phone you feel like your phone is not fighting you when you use ubuntu touch and that's way better whether that's due to them having nailed the hardware acceleration on the pine phone or not doesn't really matter because it proves that the pine phone in itself can be enough hardware to run a linux mobile operating system in a correct manner in a usable manner which is a good plus for ubuntu touch so sure there are a few bugs to fix the experience isn't ready for daily use either phosh wasn't kd plasma mobile isn't and ubuntu touch isn't either they need to fix the bugs in the settings especially the syncing bug because not having access to at least the next cloud or gmail account is just a deal breaker for me and probably for a lot of people so unless that's just a unique bug for my case this is this needs to be a priority right now ubuntu touch is an excellent operating system and it's probably the best i've used on the pine phone if you haven't tried it i encourage you to because it's really good and that concludes it for this video guys i hope 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