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I've read (don't remember where) that Android's kernel barely resembles upstream Linux.
A little more about UBports...
It's not like you can use /dev/video to use the video camera on a Linuxified phone. Instead, the system is a Debian wrapper around Android, and Android is used to get access to the proprietary device drivers. Those capabilities are then exposed to the Qt-based SDK.
So, to take a picture with the camera every few minutes, instead of running a command on a cron job I had to write a whole [GUI app][1]. Either I manually start the app using the phone's touchscreen, or I think I can launch it in dev mode remotely using tools on my laptop, but the phone still has to be manually unlocked by hand.
To top it all off, there's a memory leak in some camera-related Android service, so the app crashes after a few hours. The bug is allegedly in the Android code, so the UBports maintainers can't do anything much it (maybe backport a patch onto the source from which the Android base image is built? Who has time for that?).
For all I know, it's a good phone, but for my hacking use case it's less than ideal.
Still, any old phone camera is way better than the webcams I have lying around.
[1]: https://github.com/dgoffredo/ubuntu-touch-intervalometer