Canonical published its Ubuntu Porting Guide just a week ago and it will help developers bring the operating system to other devices than just Nexus 4 and BQ's Aquaris, but it looks like an Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus One porting project was started well before that.

Not everyone might remember this, but there was a flurry of Ubuntu Touch ports more than a year ago, for various devices. They were mostly hosted on XDA, but none of them really come to fruition. The fact that the Ubuntu platform for mobile devices was far from ready may have played an important part.

Canonical now has stable images available for download and most of the design choices and features have been implemented. Ubuntu Touch is now a lot more stable and reliable, which means that devs will probably be much more inclined to try to get it to run on other devices.

Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus One is still work in progress

Porting an operating system for another platform than the one it was built on is quite difficult. The reason why the devs on XDA have so much fun and success with Android is the fact that it's basically the same on all devices. Until now, Ubuntu has been made to work with a couple of Nexus devices, so bringing it to a completely different type of hardware will take some serious work.

A developer posted a topic on the OpenPlus One forum showing the progress of his port. The camera, sound, wireless network, GSM, and rotation are not working, so it's clear that he still has a long way to go. In any case, even in this early stages there is still a lot of interest for the port, which means that many OnePlus One users are also Linux and Ubuntu fans.

OnePlus One is a 5.5-inch phone powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset, with a Quad-core 2.5 GHz processor, 3 GB of RAM, a 13 MP camera capable of full 4K recording, and that ships with Android 4.4.2 KitKat. This is a high-end device and it's been on the market for almost a full year.