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A Month With a Ubuntu Phone
When the first Ubuntu phone came out, reviews were quick to criticize it for its lackluster hardware and unusual take on common mobile software interactions. It's been out for a while, now, and Alastair Stevenson has written about his experiences using it for an entire month. While he doesn't recommend it for phone users who aren't tech savvy, he does say that he began to like it better than Android after adjusting to how Ubuntu does things. From the article:
[T]he Ubuntu OS has a completely reworked user interface that replaces the traditional home screen with a new system of "scopes." The scope system does away with the traditional mobile interface where applications are stored and accessed from a central series of homescreens. ... Adding to Ubuntu’s otherworldly, unique feel, the OS is also significantly more touch- and gesture-focused than iOS and Android. We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ... Finally, there's my biggest criticism – Ubuntu phone is not smart enough yet. While the app selection is impressive for a prototype, in its infancy Ubuntu phone doesn't have enough data feeding into it, as key services are missing."
It's a prototype device for software development, not a shipping product.
Wrong on both accounts. The MX4 has been a shipping Android phone since September of last year. The Ubuntu phone is the exact same hardware.
It might have a substandard battery.
It does't. GSM Arena stated about 16.5 hours talk time, ~14 hours web browsing and around 9.5 hours for video playback. For the time of the battery benchmarks it was no worse than most other phones.
Such problems would not stop its deployment as a development device. It could be any of these problems and it's pretty pointless to speculate further.
Except it's not a development device.
WIth Ubuntu Phone/Touch (I swear they keep flipping what they're calling it) you get a shell, and last I used it the interface was actually pretty good. However, although many nice packages are shipped installed, you cannot by default install normal packages yourself because the root filesystem is read-only, and is updated as an incremental image with each new version. So you can disable that read-only nature and then install your own packages, but that then disables system upgrades, and if you re-enable system upgrades you are by definition wiping out all your installed packages.
In this respect I've found SailfishOS far more familiar, even though it's an RPM-based distro and I'm far more familiar with DEB-based distros, because SailfishOS under the hood acts exactly like any other distro, it just happens to run on your phone (with much of the gesture-based swishiness of Ubuntu Phone). If I want to install git, I just type "pkcon install git" or whatnot and I get it. If a system library has a bug, I can recompile it with a fix myself and replace the .so. In theory Ubuntu Phone is more open than SailfishOS (which has several components that are closed-source still), but in practice I find SailfishOS far more open in that it doesn't discourage you from playing around under the hood---not to mention that their stack is far more standard (Wayland, PackageKit+RPM, etc) than Ubuntu Phone's stack (with Mir, the whole Snappy thing and "click-packages", etc).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I bought an Ubuntu phone (MX4) 2 weeks ago and yes, you get a shell (dash). There is a terminal app (don't remember if it was pre-installed or if I installed it myself, sorry).
ssh server and rsync are pre-installed. And you get all the important GNU utilities (grep, sed, etc.), too.
The root filesystem is read-only by default but this can be changed by editing a config file (or just temporarily re-mount rw). So yes, it is more GNU/Linux-y than an Android device.
Phone and SMS apps work as expected except MMS (probably to do with wrong/missing APN settings for my provider).
Other apps I installed:
Document viewer (pdf, text files)
Dekko for e-mail, works very well except for missing notifications
Calendar needs some work but can easily be synced with a google account (or other syncml/caldav servers using syncevolution, no GUI for that though), same with contacts
Cantata, a very nice MPD client
Before the MX4 I had an aging Galaxy Nexus with Cyanogenmod and F-Droid (no google app store, only Free apps). So I am probably not your average smartphone user but the MX4 is a good replacement for that already and the hardware upgrade makes up for some missing features on the software front. I especially like the large, bright screen and the camera.