Game in the Brain

Streamed Live: December 13, 2025

Host: Alfred

Welcome to the recap of the 180th episode of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A! Alfred hosted the show solo this week, bringing us exciting hardware news, the results of the community voting awards, and a massive list of app updates.

📱 Hardware & Partner News

• Volla Keyboard Shipping: Great news from Volla—they are now shipping their VA Keyboard. It is available now alongside the Volla Tablet, showcasing the full potential of Ubuntu Touch on larger screens.
• Volla Phone Quintus: The flagship Quintus model now supports a multiboot function, allowing users to easily dual-boot between multiple operating systems.
• New Device Support: The Nothing Phone (1) (codename: Spacewar) has been added to the system image server.
• Fairphone 5 Improvements: The device is now much more stable on daily channels. Issues regarding kernel panics when toggling Wi-Fi and the “jumping keyboard” glitch (caused by a conflicting fingerprint component) have been resolved.
• Xperia X: Booting has been fixed for Halium 7.1 devices thanks to the re-addition of rsync.

⚙️ OTA & OS Development Updates

• Privacy Control (Avahi): A new toggle has been added to System Settings > Wi-Fi. Users can now enable or disable Avahi. Turning this off prevents auto-discovery of services, which is a significant privacy feature for those connecting to public Wi-Fi hotspots.
• Printing: System Settings now features a setup dialog for printers. If you try to print without CUPS installed, the system will now prompt you to install the necessary packages.
• App Drawer: The launcher now explicitly supports and lists Wayland applications and Classic Snaps.
• Morph Browser & Qt6: Work continues on the Qt6 migration. Fixes have landed for the bottom-edge swipe gesture and media player seeking/looping.
• Security: The settings button in the Lomiri network indicator is now hidden at the Greeter (login screen) to prevent unauthorized access on encrypted devices.
• Snapd: Downgraded to version 2.68.4 temporarily to resolve file system capability issues, with plans to upgrade once extended attributes are fully supported.
• CI Updates: Recovery RAM disks are now building for Halium 10+ devices. This is a precursor to the upcoming rootfs resize feature (LVM based).

🏆 Community Awards

The votes are in for the Community Favorite Awards!

Favorite App:

1. Teleports (Winner)
2. The Open Store (22%)

Favorite Developer:

1. Alfred (Winner – 25%)
2. Rajah (22%)

(Editor’s Note: Alfred had the amusing honor of congratulating himself live on air!)

📦 App Highlights

The Open Store has been busy. Here are some of the new and updated apps mentioned:

New Apps:

• Nix Manager: Manage Nix packages on your device.
• Minted: An unofficial web app for the Minted platform.
• Metronome: A simple, adjustable metronome (20-250 BPM).

Updated Apps:

• Google Maps & Royal Road: Unofficial web app wrappers/bookmarks.
• Image Composer: For stitching and editing photos.
• Signal UT: Desktop client support on UT.
• Home: A home screen replacement with DuckDuckGo and weather integration.
• Mirejo Browser: A Chromium-based browser with Tor support.
• Others: Delta Touch, KeyPassRX, UT Translator, Raven Downloader, Pure Maps, and Cindy UT.

💬 Q&A Highlights

Q: When Morph Browser upgrades to Qt6, will web apps and QML apps be impacted?

A: This will be a multi-stage rollout. Initially, a Click package of the Qt6 Morph Browser will be released. Later, after the rootfs resize, the OS will ship with both Qt6 and Qt5 web containers. This ensures that older web apps and QML Scene apps continue to function alongside the new browser.

Q: Copy/Paste doesn’t work well between native apps and non-native apps (like Libertine or Chromium). Is this intentional?

A: This is a known issue caused by the current version of Mir (1.8). We currently lack the synchronization between the Mir client and Wayland clipboard. This will be resolved when the system migrates to Mir 2.x, though that is a longer-term project.

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