In between selling iPhone cases (yes, really) and paying for product placement on the latest season of House of Cards (yes, really), OnePlus seems to have achieved something rather cool on the software front. They've partnered with Canonical, the people who make the popular Linux desktop distribution Ubuntu, in order to bring the mobile version to the original OnePlus One. Neat! OnePlus made the announcement on Google Plus.

If you'll recall, there was a big buzz around a mobile version of Ubuntu about two and a half years ago, made more notable by the quite wise decision to build user-flashable files for popular Android phones in the same manner as Android ROMs. (Ubuntu is also available on a few commercial phones, most notably the upcoming Meizu Pro 5.) Now there's a public build available for the OnePlus One for those who want to try out the Ubuntu take on mobile computing.

OnePlus makes no claim to completeness of this build, and in fact they're still recruiting developers to improve upcoming versions. At the moment it's only available on the original One, though there's a OnePlus X build planned for the near future. If you plan on taking the dive, all of the standard smartphone functions should be intact, though you might want to keep a backup of your "daily driver" ROM around somewhere.

Source: OnePlus forum