If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs (https://furilabs.com/).
I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...
Since the shop is super slow and intermittently giving a "Error establishing a database connection", for those having trouble: it's just above 600€ (base 550$ + VAT + shipping). At 17x8cm it's among the largest phones you can get, competing with e.g. the Ulefone 18T Ultra (the one with the FLIR camera, but Android). It has a headphone jack (big plus) but at that size, I just can't use that sadly. This glowing review really made me reconsider whether to see if a "real Linux" phone can work for me given how many years I've been using Linux desktops exclusively now
Indeed, on the bad side it is a little large (like the biggest iphone I guess but can still dit in a jean pocket), a little heavy, battery life average, and not perfect, like with the expectable rough edges that makes it a developer/tech enthousiast thing but not general public.
But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
> so your are forced to connect with your Google account
Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.
Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
It is not that you have to "interact" with Google the problem, in the sense of interacting like downloading an app. You can use the Aurora store, but once you try to use the app, the app itself will redirect you to an oauth2 login for your Google account, the kind that is associating your "phone"/Google service globally with your Google account. And this despite the fact that I will only use password login for openai and mistral, that should not be linked to Google anyway.
In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.
So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".
That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.
Aurora Store also runs a bunch of their own throwaway Google accounts you can use (the “anonymous” option on the sign-in screen). Usually works great, though sometimes takes a few tries to get a working account.
Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
> Many will point out that a Linux phone is less secure than Android or iOS, but that highly depends on your personal threat model. Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won.
Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories.
I find this quote[0] by the developer of SpectrumOS[1] rather telling:
<qyliss> I have embarked on the ultimate yak shave
<qyliss> it started with "I wish I could securely store passwords on my computer"
<qyliss> And now I am at the "I have funding to build my own operating system" level
Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).
Server software is usually compartmentalized in uid:s but desktop software seldom is, if ever. Package managers and maintainers could do a lot here to make it easier. Some things long time Linux users like to do, like running Firefox as a separate user, is still a much more involved process than it should be.
A lot of it is probably standards and culture work, like where a user can expect to store files and have them readable by Firefox in this example. So perhaps this is something the GNOME/Freedesktop people could have been interested in and made a difference? Instead we have things like Flatpak, which is good but not the lowest hanging fruit here.
For user-facing stuff, I agree it's hard because of the challenge of managing access to data (and I would argue no system does this well, Android has a different set of failure modes, and I've not used QubesOS but presumably it has it's own issues as well), but in the top-level comment, the concern was around using pip/npm, which to me is almost a solved problem if you care enough and are willing to put the effort (and money) in.
It's also not like Linux is any different with respect to installing random PyPI/npm packages on any other desktop/laptop OS (https://xkcd.com/1200/), so I'm not sure anything desktop Linux does here would change the fact that installing random software from the internet may be a bad idea sometimes ;)
Anyone using PostmarketOS on a phone? And I mean as a daily driver, with no other phone. I have been following it for years and would like to switch someday, but that moment hasn't happened yet.
Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.
I do use a Pinephone (not pro) for 5y now. I switched to the "stable" branch of pmos 2y ago which made my life siginicantly more hassle free.
Note that pmos support for pinephone (not pro) degraded in recent stable release, so i recommend to not run 24.12 but the prior version. you will still get occasional updates from the stable alpine branch it's based on (which makes 99% of available packages anyway).
I used mobian for a few months, but I normally have 2 sim cards, and battery life was really short.
Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.
The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.
I do, a Oneplus 6, PMOS "edge" with OpenRC + Phosh. Everything is fine, except I still need to reboot the phone after each call to be sure to have the audio working
Sailfish(OS) supports VoLTE in newer, supported devices. For community ports and other mobile Linux distros it's afaik still rare. Closed drivers and obtaining configurations for carriers in other countries are the 2 big showstoppers.
I have a OnePlus 6 becoming "free" soon and I will definitely give PostmarketOS a shot (I had a glance at their compatibility list and noticed the OP6 is on there). Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
I have been thinking daily driving Linux phone just to manage smartphone addiction. My first step was to get rid of my MacBook. Now, a year later, I think I'm ready to get rid of the Apple Watch. With the watch, it has been surprising how much you think you need to record your HR and workouts -- but it's just another bogus number that you don't need. Later the year I think I'll be finally ready for the phone. This would happen by getting an iPad mini first, which would stay at home while I go to work with the phone only. I think the hard class of apps to get rid of is mainly "Travel", plus password manager (I use passage but the transition will take time) + Find My. But travel is very much planned in my life, so for those occasions I can take my iPad mini with me.
Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol. My friend and I both installed the client to be able to contact him and maintain a friendship.
After a few months, we both lost contact with him simultaneously: something was updated in the client, and it was impossible to re-establish contact with him without a F2F interaction (="privacy"). Sadly, he was also uncontactable by text message. For both of us, the friendship simply ceased to exist.
My reflection is that such things --as with many things in life-- are on a spectrum. At some point on the spectrum, as you head towards the extreme end, your position on that spectrum (be it voluntary or --as with disease-- involuntary) start to impair your ability to live (what might be considered) a normal functional life. I'd also hazard that moving towards that extreme end of the spectrum beings increasing small gains, coupled with increasingly large downsides.
I'm not suggesting that running a pure Linux phone is extreme, but it's definitely in the middle zone where there are definite downsides.
I run an older Android phone without a Google account. All apps are from F-Droid. Google services are all turned off. Mail is Thunderbird, browser is Fennec.
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services.
Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few:
Happens to me all the time. Also on laptops, secureboot is such a life saver any time you're out and about
...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
Lookup LineageOS and CalyxOS. I use CalyxOS with MicroG and can download apps from the app store without a Google account or Google services (although some apps won't work without them of course).
I was daily driving Linux phones 15 years ago! It's crazy to think back on the journey. I have great nostalgia for the Nokia N900 but god damn Maemo/Meego was a piece of shit. When you can't even answer phone calls it's not daily driving anymore, it's beta testing.
After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.
Isn't every Android phone a Linux phone? OK, i guess we want something that is less encumbered and more transparent with more digital sovereignty for the user than the Android that we get from the various big phone vendors.
What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones". The linked article states "Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won." but this also applies to AOSP Android devices with open source apps.
In other words: If you seek a Linux phone, why aren't you picking GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Is there anything else that's missing?
For me personally at least a few aspects about this are efficiency and control:
The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).
Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.
That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
Fully agreed as a former N900 and now Fairphone+LineageOS user.
Some more things to add: On the N900 updates were quick, easy and painless to a degree that no current phone OS matches: You just to "apt update && apt upgrade", reboot will only happen when really necessary, otherwise any small component (which are just .deb packages as in Debian or Ubuntu) will just be upgraded and restarted in place, without a big download, interruption and reboot. And most importantly, without waiting for a slow vendor to collect and package up all the tiny updates into a big 1GB package that can then be delivered weeks late...
Also, Backups. The only backup solution for a non-rooted phone nowadays is "use our cloud, trust us", and even then backups are always incomplete, because an increasing number of apps set the "no-backup" flags and do (or not do) their own thing, selling you yet one more cloud subscription just to get your own data into "safety". And even with a rooted LineageOS, backups are still a huge pain and incomplete. On the N900, you could just run any old normal Linux backup software, and be done. Imagine, your phone just sending its stuff to your company tape library, no hassle!
And (didn't try this, but should have worked): remote management. SSH into your users' phones to do stuff. Run ansible/puppet/..., manage them like any old Linux box. No tedious mobile device crap management that doesn't really do most of the useful shit, only works on half the hardware and in the end is just yet another cloud lock in by some vendor.
It still makes zero sense to take the XDG/dbus/whatever stack and make it run on a phone, suboptimally, when AOSP is right there and has already solved all the thousands of integration issues you'll run into --- plus, it's already free software.
NIH is the only rationale for the "Linux" phone thing and it's why it will be forever fringe. People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
One could ask why AOSP was created when there was an existing userland on linux that could be used (and was, by Nokia).
More seriously, I think the reason people want to do this is threefold:
1. Android vendors almost universally seem to make it hard to run stock AOSP (and do the Windows bloatware thing that Windows vendors were known for), so a "linux phone" lets people run what they want and remove what they do not
2. AOSP, while open source, is not developed in any way like a community open source project, so their ability to change anything, especially anything Google does not want to change, is limited and means constant rebasing
3. AOSP doesn't really solve the "run a modern/non-buggy kernel" issue on existing vendor hardware (as far as I know), so if you're going to spend time on getting the kernel to work, you probably want to have a userland that is amenable for getting the kernel working, so AOSP isn't helpful there, and by the time you've done all this, you can probably just run the rest of the standard setup with a distro and tooling you are already familiar with
I think the interesting thing would be if the modern kernel work from (3) could be used by an AOSP build and get the best of both worlds, or if by the time you do all this AOSP is too resource intensive to run on the device, and so running the alternative is the only option.
I agree with your overall point but the following comment is unnecessary:
> People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
People are free to spent their free time however they want. Some people view building things, whether it’s furniture or software, more enjoyable than playing computer games or watching TV.
Canonical keeps doing stupid, anti-user, anti-community stuff constantly, to the point that many people consider them to be the Microsoft of the Linux world.
For instance, not long ago, they were including ads/Amazon results in the Apps menu[1], similar to what Microsoft did with the Start menu. They also keep sneaking in suggestions (aka ads) for their Ubuntu Pro subscription in various places like the MOTD, or when you run apt[2], which isn't cool.
Most recently, the biggest annoyance is with the way they've been aggressively pushing their Snap store, to the point of even hijacking regular "apt install" commands - normally, you'd expect an "apt install" to fetch a regular .deb from the distro's repos, but they silently hijack the command to fetch apps from their Snap store instead[3]. Now, you may think that normal, non-technical users don't need to care about Snaps - and you'd be right, if they actually worked well. Snaps are slow and buggy and have been a constant source of pain for many users[4].
A major issue is with how buggy Ubuntu has become, especially OS upgrades, which may result in anything from minor issues like broken shortcuts, to complete breakage[5]. This might lead you to think that it's better to do a fresh install, but of late, new ISO releases have been incredibly buggy - like the 24.04 LTS installer, which kept crashing for many users[6] - and considering that LTS is supposed to be the super-stable version, that is not a good user experience.
Finally, my pet peeve is with how commercial Canonical have become, like with pushing their Pro subscriptions to targeting enterprises over end users. A couple of months ago, someone was complaining about how confusing the website had become, where the first "download" button you saw wasn't for the Ubuntu ISO, but some enterprise crap. Everything on the website just screamed "corporate"[7].
It feels like Canonical has long shed it's newbie-friendly image and turned into a soulless corporation, not unlike Microsoft.
“The year of the Linux desktop” has always been a stupid statement because it never quantifies what the success criteria is.
For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc
Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.
There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.
So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?
The Linux kernel is a beast of an engine at the heart of all sorts of things, from small to large.
But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).
Linux desktop is very pleasant to use now compared to 5 years before. I tried a lot of times to switch to linux before but it never stuck, now I use only linux on my desktop.
But need all that software for phones, make it compatible, stable, easy to install etc. maybe it will happen if some company invests in it. Like gaming on linux and valve
I blocked reader mode and it worked fine. Not an excuse, but it is common for sites to not work well for phones. I find it a bit surprising these days but hey, Wikipedia knows how to redirect desktop links to mobile versions but not the reverse and they have the great foresight to add an automatic option to dark mode settings but wild idiocy to set the default configuration to light mode.
I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed
I'm already using Librem 5 as a daily driver. It challenging sometimes but also brings a lot of nice features like running desktop apps (Firefox with all plugins!) or native terminal.
I get that the appeal of using a Linux phone is being able to say “my phone is a Linux phone” but you could also just say that about any phone anyway. Most people will just nod when you say that and occasionally somebody will get incandescently angry. That is fine, good even. Variety is the spice of life
Good luck. Almost every service you need for a smart phone to be "smart" anything requires being part of the Google or Apple botnet. Yeah, you can install whatever crap you like on your phone. Maybe it will do SMS? Kewl. Want maps, mobile banking, 2-factor auth, different password managers, music streaming, and so on... good luck without one of the app stores. Also, being unplugged sometimes means your phone won't even work for calling beyond SMS. Since its baked into the ROM image and you have to hope that the devs have added support for your hardware. So you trade a smart phone (a useful device for the modern world) for a goofy neckbeard terminal in your pocket (too small to be used for any complex input.)
Some countries have a high number of scams. You need to physically go to a bank, verify multiple forms of id, facial scan, get their app with facial recognition, and hope your face does not deviate when traveling. A relative gained 20lbs traveling and facial recognition failed. They had to ask a friend to pay their bills and go back to their home country to re-verify everything. Some companies require specific apps for authentication too.
If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs (https://furilabs.com/).
I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...
Since the shop is super slow and intermittently giving a "Error establishing a database connection", for those having trouble: it's just above 600€ (base 550$ + VAT + shipping). At 17x8cm it's among the largest phones you can get, competing with e.g. the Ulefone 18T Ultra (the one with the FLIR camera, but Android). It has a headphone jack (big plus) but at that size, I just can't use that sadly. This glowing review really made me reconsider whether to see if a "real Linux" phone can work for me given how many years I've been using Linux desktops exclusively now
Indeed, on the bad side it is a little large (like the biggest iphone I guess but can still dit in a jean pocket), a little heavy, battery life average, and not perfect, like with the expectable rough edges that makes it a developer/tech enthousiast thing but not general public.
But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
> so your are forced to connect with your Google account
Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.
Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
It is not that you have to "interact" with Google the problem, in the sense of interacting like downloading an app. You can use the Aurora store, but once you try to use the app, the app itself will redirect you to an oauth2 login for your Google account, the kind that is associating your "phone"/Google service globally with your Google account. And this despite the fact that I will only use password login for openai and mistral, that should not be linked to Google anyway.
In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.
So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".
That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.
So the problem is the "push" not the "pull".
Aurora Store also runs a bunch of their own throwaway Google accounts you can use (the “anonymous” option on the sign-in screen). Usually works great, though sometimes takes a few tries to get a working account.
Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
>fur iphone
Science has gone too far!
Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.
Terrible auto complete, thanks for the notification, I was able to correct still.
So furiphone (fxl1) and hopefully nothing related to "iphone".
> Many will point out that a Linux phone is less secure than Android or iOS, but that highly depends on your personal threat model. Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won.
Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories.
I find this quote[0] by the developer of SpectrumOS[1] rather telling:
[0]: https://alyssa.is/about/[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/
Firejail and apparmor have existed for years. If you don't use them maybe it's your fault?
Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?
Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).
Server software is usually compartmentalized in uid:s but desktop software seldom is, if ever. Package managers and maintainers could do a lot here to make it easier. Some things long time Linux users like to do, like running Firefox as a separate user, is still a much more involved process than it should be.
A lot of it is probably standards and culture work, like where a user can expect to store files and have them readable by Firefox in this example. So perhaps this is something the GNOME/Freedesktop people could have been interested in and made a difference? Instead we have things like Flatpak, which is good but not the lowest hanging fruit here.
You're going to deal with the users who can't attach a file to an email because the firefox process has no access to it?
For user-facing stuff, I agree it's hard because of the challenge of managing access to data (and I would argue no system does this well, Android has a different set of failure modes, and I've not used QubesOS but presumably it has it's own issues as well), but in the top-level comment, the concern was around using pip/npm, which to me is almost a solved problem if you care enough and are willing to put the effort (and money) in.
It's also not like Linux is any different with respect to installing random PyPI/npm packages on any other desktop/laptop OS (https://xkcd.com/1200/), so I'm not sure anything desktop Linux does here would change the fact that installing random software from the internet may be a bad idea sometimes ;)
Anyone using PostmarketOS on a phone? And I mean as a daily driver, with no other phone. I have been following it for years and would like to switch someday, but that moment hasn't happened yet.
Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.
I do use a Pinephone (not pro) for 5y now. I switched to the "stable" branch of pmos 2y ago which made my life siginicantly more hassle free. Note that pmos support for pinephone (not pro) degraded in recent stable release, so i recommend to not run 24.12 but the prior version. you will still get occasional updates from the stable alpine branch it's based on (which makes 99% of available packages anyway).
VoLTE works fine (phosh with gnome-calls)
feel free to ask questions you may have
Thank you.
Do you use Waydroid and Android apps? Apps like Whatsapp and Signal are things I use.
I used mobian for a few months, but I normally have 2 sim cards, and battery life was really short.
Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.
The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.
Here is one recent report after using PinePhone with PostmarketOS and Phosh for a few years:
Daily Driving a Linux Phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750756 - 2 days ago (3 points, 2 comments)
I do, a Oneplus 6, PMOS "edge" with OpenRC + Phosh. Everything is fine, except I still need to reboot the phone after each call to be sure to have the audio working
How is 4G calling (VoLTE) these days? Last I heard it needed quite a bit of a manual work to get it going.
Sailfish(OS) supports VoLTE in newer, supported devices. For community ports and other mobile Linux distros it's afaik still rare. Closed drivers and obtaining configurations for carriers in other countries are the 2 big showstoppers.
I have a OnePlus 6 becoming "free" soon and I will definitely give PostmarketOS a shot (I had a glance at their compatibility list and noticed the OP6 is on there). Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
I have been thinking daily driving Linux phone just to manage smartphone addiction. My first step was to get rid of my MacBook. Now, a year later, I think I'm ready to get rid of the Apple Watch. With the watch, it has been surprising how much you think you need to record your HR and workouts -- but it's just another bogus number that you don't need. Later the year I think I'll be finally ready for the phone. This would happen by getting an iPad mini first, which would stay at home while I go to work with the phone only. I think the hard class of apps to get rid of is mainly "Travel", plus password manager (I use passage but the transition will take time) + Find My. But travel is very much planned in my life, so for those occasions I can take my iPad mini with me.
But why, indeed.
Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol. My friend and I both installed the client to be able to contact him and maintain a friendship.
After a few months, we both lost contact with him simultaneously: something was updated in the client, and it was impossible to re-establish contact with him without a F2F interaction (="privacy"). Sadly, he was also uncontactable by text message. For both of us, the friendship simply ceased to exist.
My reflection is that such things --as with many things in life-- are on a spectrum. At some point on the spectrum, as you head towards the extreme end, your position on that spectrum (be it voluntary or --as with disease-- involuntary) start to impair your ability to live (what might be considered) a normal functional life. I'd also hazard that moving towards that extreme end of the spectrum beings increasing small gains, coupled with increasingly large downsides.
I'm not suggesting that running a pure Linux phone is extreme, but it's definitely in the middle zone where there are definite downsides.
I run an older Android phone without a Google account. All apps are from F-Droid. Google services are all turned off. Mail is Thunderbird, browser is Fennec.
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
Yes, I do this routinely.
Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services. Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
It should be said though that only Pixel, Fairphone, and maybe some Motorolas support relocking the bootloader with a custom OS.
Without that ability, anyone can plug in to your phone and write whatever they want to the internal flash and your phone will be none the wiser.
Happens to me all the time. Also on laptops, secureboot is such a life saver any time you're out and about
...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
Routinely? How often do you buy a new phone? :)
Or maybe it is because mobile computing is just stuck, and it won't move even in decades ...
Yes, it is.
Lookup LineageOS and CalyxOS. I use CalyxOS with MicroG and can download apps from the app store without a Google account or Google services (although some apps won't work without them of course).
I was daily driving Linux phones 15 years ago! It's crazy to think back on the journey. I have great nostalgia for the Nokia N900 but god damn Maemo/Meego was a piece of shit. When you can't even answer phone calls it's not daily driving anymore, it's beta testing.
After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.
Isn't every Android phone a Linux phone? OK, i guess we want something that is less encumbered and more transparent with more digital sovereignty for the user than the Android that we get from the various big phone vendors.
What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones". The linked article states "Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won." but this also applies to AOSP Android devices with open source apps.
In other words: If you seek a Linux phone, why aren't you picking GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Is there anything else that's missing?
For me personally at least a few aspects about this are efficiency and control:
The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).
Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.
That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
Fully agreed as a former N900 and now Fairphone+LineageOS user.
Some more things to add: On the N900 updates were quick, easy and painless to a degree that no current phone OS matches: You just to "apt update && apt upgrade", reboot will only happen when really necessary, otherwise any small component (which are just .deb packages as in Debian or Ubuntu) will just be upgraded and restarted in place, without a big download, interruption and reboot. And most importantly, without waiting for a slow vendor to collect and package up all the tiny updates into a big 1GB package that can then be delivered weeks late...
Also, Backups. The only backup solution for a non-rooted phone nowadays is "use our cloud, trust us", and even then backups are always incomplete, because an increasing number of apps set the "no-backup" flags and do (or not do) their own thing, selling you yet one more cloud subscription just to get your own data into "safety". And even with a rooted LineageOS, backups are still a huge pain and incomplete. On the N900, you could just run any old normal Linux backup software, and be done. Imagine, your phone just sending its stuff to your company tape library, no hassle!
And (didn't try this, but should have worked): remote management. SSH into your users' phones to do stuff. Run ansible/puppet/..., manage them like any old Linux box. No tedious mobile device crap management that doesn't really do most of the useful shit, only works on half the hardware and in the end is just yet another cloud lock in by some vendor.
GrapheneOS only supports a few specific Google phones, so it's not an option for most cases
It still makes zero sense to take the XDG/dbus/whatever stack and make it run on a phone, suboptimally, when AOSP is right there and has already solved all the thousands of integration issues you'll run into --- plus, it's already free software.
NIH is the only rationale for the "Linux" phone thing and it's why it will be forever fringe. People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
One could ask why AOSP was created when there was an existing userland on linux that could be used (and was, by Nokia).
More seriously, I think the reason people want to do this is threefold: 1. Android vendors almost universally seem to make it hard to run stock AOSP (and do the Windows bloatware thing that Windows vendors were known for), so a "linux phone" lets people run what they want and remove what they do not 2. AOSP, while open source, is not developed in any way like a community open source project, so their ability to change anything, especially anything Google does not want to change, is limited and means constant rebasing 3. AOSP doesn't really solve the "run a modern/non-buggy kernel" issue on existing vendor hardware (as far as I know), so if you're going to spend time on getting the kernel to work, you probably want to have a userland that is amenable for getting the kernel working, so AOSP isn't helpful there, and by the time you've done all this, you can probably just run the rest of the standard setup with a distro and tooling you are already familiar with
I think the interesting thing would be if the modern kernel work from (3) could be used by an AOSP build and get the best of both worlds, or if by the time you do all this AOSP is too resource intensive to run on the device, and so running the alternative is the only option.
I agree with your overall point but the following comment is unnecessary:
> People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
People are free to spent their free time however they want. Some people view building things, whether it’s furniture or software, more enjoyable than playing computer games or watching TV.
Try getting a patch into android vs getting a patch into a debian package and tell me how it's the same thing :D
> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone?
One is actually working without draining the battery in an hour and has an actually working security model.
Sorry for the tongue in cheek reply, but I am in complete agreement with you.
> actually working security model.
?
If you use a famous and popular vendor like Samsung, if you're really really lucky your 0-day will take 9 months to be fixed.
I know right, when will Android vendors actually release security patches on time?
> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone?
The latter is:
- not being developed by Google which chooses what's better for them,
- provides convenient development tools,
- runs any desktop Linux software, can serve as a desktop when connected to a keyboard/screen,
- native terminal, including ssh, sshfs, X forwarding etc,
- allows to choose the OS you run.
More: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
The term "Linux operating system" refers to Mozilla/systemd[optional]/Xorg/bash/GNU/Linux and does not refer to Google/Facebook/Samsung/Linux
And who decided that ?
This website is hostile to scrolling on mobile, I've never seen a worse UX pattern in my life.
But for me, I see so much potential in Linux phones, but after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup, I won't hold my breath.
> after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup
Linux desktops are very much usable now, especially if you choose a competent DE like KDE, and a decent distro (ie, not Ubuntu).
Is there anything particular you find the Linux desktop still lacks majorly, preventing you from switching?
What's wrong with Ubuntu?
Canonical keeps doing stupid, anti-user, anti-community stuff constantly, to the point that many people consider them to be the Microsoft of the Linux world.
For instance, not long ago, they were including ads/Amazon results in the Apps menu[1], similar to what Microsoft did with the Start menu. They also keep sneaking in suggestions (aka ads) for their Ubuntu Pro subscription in various places like the MOTD, or when you run apt[2], which isn't cool.
Most recently, the biggest annoyance is with the way they've been aggressively pushing their Snap store, to the point of even hijacking regular "apt install" commands - normally, you'd expect an "apt install" to fetch a regular .deb from the distro's repos, but they silently hijack the command to fetch apps from their Snap store instead[3]. Now, you may think that normal, non-technical users don't need to care about Snaps - and you'd be right, if they actually worked well. Snaps are slow and buggy and have been a constant source of pain for many users[4].
A major issue is with how buggy Ubuntu has become, especially OS upgrades, which may result in anything from minor issues like broken shortcuts, to complete breakage[5]. This might lead you to think that it's better to do a fresh install, but of late, new ISO releases have been incredibly buggy - like the 24.04 LTS installer, which kept crashing for many users[6] - and considering that LTS is supposed to be the super-stable version, that is not a good user experience.
Finally, my pet peeve is with how commercial Canonical have become, like with pushing their Pro subscriptions to targeting enterprises over end users. A couple of months ago, someone was complaining about how confusing the website had become, where the first "download" button you saw wasn't for the Ubuntu ISO, but some enterprise crap. Everything on the website just screamed "corporate"[7].
It feels like Canonical has long shed it's newbie-friendly image and turned into a soulless corporation, not unlike Microsoft.
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explai...
[2] https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLDQA2f1GM4
[4] https://rl.bloat.cat/r/linux4noobs/comments/1cgw11u/snaps_ar...
[5] https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1__qfYXtv0
[7] https://bsky.app/profile/mary.my.id/post/3lghc4rjqg2vd
“The year of the Linux desktop” has always been a stupid statement because it never quantifies what the success criteria is.
For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc
Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.
There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.
So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?
The Linux kernel is a beast of an engine at the heart of all sorts of things, from small to large.
But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).
Do people still use desktops?
To answer your question.
Linux desktop is very pleasant to use now compared to 5 years before. I tried a lot of times to switch to linux before but it never stuck, now I use only linux on my desktop.
But need all that software for phones, make it compatible, stable, easy to install etc. maybe it will happen if some company invests in it. Like gaming on linux and valve
I blocked reader mode and it worked fine. Not an excuse, but it is common for sites to not work well for phones. I find it a bit surprising these days but hey, Wikipedia knows how to redirect desktop links to mobile versions but not the reverse and they have the great foresight to add an automatic option to dark mode settings but wild idiocy to set the default configuration to light mode.
I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed
I'm already using Librem 5 as a daily driver. It challenging sometimes but also brings a lot of nice features like running desktop apps (Firefox with all plugins!) or native terminal.
I have a FreeBSD VM on my iPhone but I'm not using it for any phone-related tasks.
One of these days I'll get a phone that can run Genode's Sculpt Movile OS.
Have read this with one thought: "I don't deseve this shit"
I get that the appeal of using a Linux phone is being able to say “my phone is a Linux phone” but you could also just say that about any phone anyway. Most people will just nod when you say that and occasionally somebody will get incandescently angry. That is fine, good even. Variety is the spice of life
And yes this nonencrypted shit is totally insecure
While the never fixed 0days on android are completely secure.
And let's not forget the several noclick attacks that can root your iphone with a message :)
Good luck. Almost every service you need for a smart phone to be "smart" anything requires being part of the Google or Apple botnet. Yeah, you can install whatever crap you like on your phone. Maybe it will do SMS? Kewl. Want maps, mobile banking, 2-factor auth, different password managers, music streaming, and so on... good luck without one of the app stores. Also, being unplugged sometimes means your phone won't even work for calling beyond SMS. Since its baked into the ROM image and you have to hope that the devs have added support for your hardware. So you trade a smart phone (a useful device for the modern world) for a goofy neckbeard terminal in your pocket (too small to be used for any complex input.)
You can do a lot of this on the web.
Hang on, did you just cite 2-factor auth as something that requires a proprietary app? And password managers?
Some countries have a high number of scams. You need to physically go to a bank, verify multiple forms of id, facial scan, get their app with facial recognition, and hope your face does not deviate when traveling. A relative gained 20lbs traveling and facial recognition failed. They had to ask a friend to pay their bills and go back to their home country to re-verify everything. Some companies require specific apps for authentication too.