💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~nonsensor › gemlog › 2022 › 05 › 23 › touch.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 21:20:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-04)
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I try to stick to Linux projects that are doable without a lot of hemming, hawing, and entering commands that I really don't understand.
To that end, I used the excellent UBPorts to install Ubuntu Touch on a 2013 ASUS Nexus 7 tablet. My brother gave me the tablet when I was considering a Chromebook (which eventually also ran a Debian variant; I'm typing on it). He was convinced that since it was fairly top of the line at the time that it'd be great, but alas. Not only was it sluggish and unable to be updated to current Android operating system versions, tablet support for Android in general seemed to be getting more and more limited.
I'm not gonna say that Ubuntu Touch has proven very different in that respect. There aren't a lot of apps out there and what there is seems to be hacker-friendly stuff (a Gemini browser!) and some mobile games. But I can check mail (through the web -- why are there no email clients?), read color ebooks, watch media through the Plex web interface, and do light web browsing. It even allows the use of a mouse, keyboard, and monitor via Desktop Mode.
Support could be better too. There is some active development happening, but even the subreddit is a ghost town.
So the tablet is not now suddenly the most useful thing on earth, but it is more useful than the Android brick it was, and of course it's un-Googled too.