Will Librem 5 phone hardware be usable for Ubuntu Touch OS?

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hi,
I would like to know if there is at least on the paper device tree for Librem 5 phone, and if designers had thought about Ubuntu Touch to be also running on it?

Since Ubuntu Touch is mostly ported on android devices things would have to go differently on this phone, I would like to know if there was discussion regarding this and if possible what was result of it. :slight_smile:

thanks

2

My limited understanding is that the Librem-5 starts out where Ubuntu Touch is/was trying to go. Ubuntu Touch was trying to gradually wean Android users away from Google dependency, specifically Google’s control of the underlying Android kernel which is a Google-modified Linux kernel. For various reasons, it’s like pulling teeth to get Google to accept security/privacy patches to that kernel.

Librem-5 further improves on the Ubuntu Touch devices by trying hard to achieve opensource hardware (free of proprietary firmware blobs)–not an easy task.

Also, i did see a 2013 video on Youtube where Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation criticized Canonical (who developed Ubuntu Touch) for including spyware (i.e., targeted advertising) in their Ubuntu desktop distribution:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc

I dunno if that spyware issue was ever resolved or if it migrated to Ubuntu Touch.

3

@thepeter: Ubuntu Touch is dead (no more updates since april 2017) and I would recommend to shift away. It is already vulnerable for example to Blueborne and will never be patched. By the time Librem 5 is shipped, it will be vulnerable to all kinds of hell.

@SpeciesDefender: his has caused so much outrage canonical decided to pull back this “feature” since unity 8(2015). It didnt make it into touch.

4

The development of a fork of Ubuntu touch is still going on with the Ubports community. Do you reckon that they have security flaws?

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Like any piece of software, UBPorts has security flaws. But so does Pure OS.

The developers of UBPorts would highly disagree with this statement. It is more correct that Canonical no longer supports Ubuntu Touch. Seeing that this isn’t Canonical, I’m not sure that Stallman’s criticism of Canonical for their desktop distro is relevant here.

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