The arrival of Ubuntu Touch has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the obvious reasons of the fact that you can now own a single smart device for all your basic computing needs especially given that Convergence is the biggest deal about Ubuntu’s mobile operating system.
I otherwise see it as a curse due to it’s limited availability on devices of today which is entirely understandable given that it’s still very new and of course in its early stages.
However, this “limited availabilty” may not necessarily be a big deal in the foreseable future given that a developer by the name Marius Gripsgard is actively working on porting the open source operating system to a number of flagship Android devices – that date as far back as the original LG-made Google Nexus 5 with the latest on his list being the recently released OnePlus 3.
Marius’s work on porting the operating system has been ongoing for some months now and has shown trememdous progress – and well, this is so much of a feat for a single developer to achieve all by himself.
UBports however, needs to be encouraged in order to effectively continue their work on porting Ubuntu Touch on this range of dev-friendly Android devices that include the Nexus 5, 5x, 6, 9, Fairphone 2, OnePlus 1, 2, X and 3.
Marius is asking all Ubuntu enthusiasts and Linux lovers alike to open warm hands towards the project and support him on Patreon so he may work on porting the operating system to the range of devices listed above.
As at the time of this writng, UBports has received a total of 11 Patrons who have pledged $42; – we admonish you to join the band of Patrons to support Marius’s effort so that Ubuntu Touch won’t just be limited to devices that run it officially.
Marius also promises ongoing software support for the aforementioned smartphones (should he received the requested support) – and (hopefully) also grow the list of supported devices.
Conclusively, you can watch the video below to hear from Marius Gripsgard himself and if you’ve got some development skills, UBports can sure use more hands to speed up development; so please, do not hesitate to join!
How much would it cost to finish the excellent work started on porting Touch onto Xperia devices (notably Z Ultra)?
currently, no Xperia device is supported by UBport officially but you can request that they add it to their list through their “voting device” platform…learn more here: https://devices.ubports.com/#/
Xperia was one of the community ports that Canonical named just before
Barcelona this year – its working title is Minato –
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices/minato – though, as you can see,
it has some (fairly fundamental) issues!