Purism are working on a Debian phone! https://puri.sm/

(I wish them luck...)

I bought the BQ Ubuntu tablet. I hate to say it, but it's terrible. You have to set up a cloud account with Canonical to download or update apps (no reason given). Most of the apps are pretty bad. It's constantly pinging YouTube and news websites to show me stuff I don't care about, and can't turn off. No easy way to set up a VPN. No CalDAV, CardDAV. Difficult to imagine Shuttleworth himself using one.

Fine for watching films on airplanes, but very little else.

> No easy way to set up a VPN.

That's not true, it's right there in the network settings. I use it. Maybe it just doesn't support the type of VPN you want to use?

I stand corrected!

Is it a real linux system under the hood though? I don't care much about apps or anything, I care about being able to customize it to work how I want. terminal, cron, scripts, etc.

Technically yes, it's a slight variant of Ubuntu. However the packaging system out of the box doesn't allow `sudo apt-get install x` (at this point I stopped).

You would actually kill someone after using it in current edition - yourself.

not good, eh? What don't you like about it?

I run Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 4, have done for about 6 months now.

It's tolerable, and refreshingly non-intrusive compared to Android. At one point I started craving Snapchat and put Android back on, but all the intrusive nag screens put me off and I went back to Ubuntu.

It crashes a lot but that might just be my Nexus 4, it used to do it on Android too.

It's a bit slow, the camera app is rubbish, there's no Snapchat, the email client has some weird bugs, there's no adblock. But it has Telegram, and it can do calls and texts, the web browser is OK, and the terminal app is good.