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Now the installation process has completed! I did a few restarts to make sure it was all booting and working correctly and all was fine so here we go. It is a really beautiful and finely designed system in the same way as I find Ubuntu finely almost delicately designed. It is not at all cartoony as Windows or Android can sometimes appear. So first steps to get things up and going, connect to WiFi, I put in a 64GB microSD card and an old prepaid SIM that I had lying around for testing purposes.
As I am prone to do, I first took a look around the openstore which is the app store for ubuntu touch. There are maybe a couple of hundred apps in it with a few navigation apps, various video and media players and all sorts of other stuff. I sat down and read through a number of articles about how to do this and that and installed a few standard apps that looked like they might be useful. Whilst doing this I realised just how slick and smooth the android ecosystem is, it all works and the more complicated stuff runs unseen in the background, it is, undoubtedly, a serious achievement and has ripened and grown over the years from beginnings that were, perhaps, not too unlike ubuntu touch at the moment. I began to realise just how dependent I have become on the android ecosystem and resolved to move my “cloudliness” into somewhere a little less transparent to big tech companies. For this I got myself a bit of cloud space in a variant of the nextcloud system. Now began the challenge to get my nextcloud system linked up with the ubuntu touch phone, needless to say, anyone who has twiddled about with linux can probably predict that a certain amount of reading, trying, failing, trying again was necessary but I now have everything connected (files, calendar) except for the address book which I am still trying to get linked up (it will work I just don´t know how at the moment and am taking a break). Email runs well with the dekko2 app with receiving and sending going well.
My next steps/goals are:
- Get contacts synced with my nextcloud
- Get Telegram app up and running
Then I shall consider swapping my normal SIM in and using it as my daily phone for a while. First impressions are very positive and I can see the attraction of this operating system. It does require a bit of work to get things up and running and I feel as though I was spoilt for years with Android.
