14 DAY TRIAL // Windows phone (Lumia 1020) is probably the last place where you would expect to see Ubuntu, but a user has posted images with Ubuntu running on this device and they seem to be legit.
The first thing that users might think is that someone ported Ubuntu Touch for the Lumia 1020 device and that would not be an impossible task. It would be difficult but not impossible. It would also be a difficult to install a custom ROM, but that's also not impossible. The interesting thing is that the images show an Ubuntu system running and not the Touch version.
Running Ubuntu on a Lumia 1020 devices tells us two things. One is that the Linux kernel has hardware support for the specs of the devices, and the second one is that the device is powerful enough to run it. In any case, it's an odd choice and the only reason to do this is to show that you can. There is basically no practical application to this, besides the cool factor.
Lumia 1020 is a beast and not the obvious choice
The images posted on gizmochina.com are very generic and they don't provide enough details. From what little information can be determined, it looks like the system running is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, if we take a closer look at the Nautilus file manager. Also, it's in Chinese and it's not Ubuntu Kylin.
Lumia 1020 is described as a camera phone because it comes with a 41 MP camera on the back. It's an impressive camera and it's definitely the strong point of the device. It's also powered by the Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon chipset, it comes with a 1.5 GHz Krait processor, and the Adreno 225 GPU. It also sports a 768 x 1280 AMOLED display, which is a good thing because it's a resolution easily recognizable by the OS. It was initially released back in summer of 2013, so you might consider it an old phone.
On the other hand, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was released in April, 2014, but Ubuntu Touch would definitely make much more sense. It's a new operating system developed by Canonical and it's been in the works for a couple of years. The latest version shows that it's almost ready to arrive on the market and we can only hope that developers will drop the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from Lumia 1020 and try to adopt Ubuntu Touch.
