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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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My problem with linux phones was the hardware. Either far too expensive or too cheap and slow. And the cellular radio is ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY.
I would get one at a $300 price point with 12 hour battery life that can play HD video without hiccups. Also would be nice to have open source baseband drivers in it.
I've got really low standards that haven't been met.
Yeah, this.
Last legit fairly open sauce was N900.
Exactly. It is infuriating that such hardware is so expensive and/or incapable
I looked into this for myself but I was told a lot of what has already been said here and decided to go with a pixel + graphene OS .
I'm probably sticking with this type of setup until there's a proper Linux phone that can be easily used as a daily driver.
I think the key is patience. One day I think we'll have something that will be able to daily drive Linux that won't feel like you're using the alpha release of android.
I mean GrapheneOS is probably the most secure OS on the planet and also privacy friendly. Android is annoying sometimes but its pretty okay and the security standards are veeery high
Quite unfortunate that we can't escape the corporate grasp for our mobile operating systems
I've bought a Nexus 4 to play around with Ubuntu Touch many years ago, but I really don't think I could daily drive even a more powerful Linux phone. Many apps from messengers to banking apps are Android/iOS only, so it'd be really inconvenient to use — not to mention problems with calling and a not-so-great camera.
Almost all things I want to do on a phone are possible with a Pixel + GrapheneOS, which also makes an open source, secure and private phone OS.
Usually ssh'ing into a server through termux is all I need, altough it'd be cool to be able to plug my phone into a monitor and have a desktop with me all the time. But it being "cool" is the problem, as it's not useful day to fay for me. If I need a pc I'll take my laptop. I'll probably try it at some point, but that's many years into the future.
Man, the call problems are a dealbreaker for any phone at all, imo. Maybe not for a toy, but it's bonkers that they'd release a phone OS that isn't 100% call stable.
There has to be a device to develop support for calling. Since there're multiple open source phone projects it's also not simple to just write an implementation for them. Additionally carriers don't work all the same (different bands, ...), so it's really not easy to solve with the few resources available. As far as I know much of the development on these phone OS is done by volunteers and pine64 isn't a big established company either.
Copying my edit here: I am willing to watch content and use banking apps from the browser. Do you think it'll be fit for me?
Performance and bugs might still be a problem with these relatively young projects. But if all you need is a browser I do believe it might be worth a shot.
In the EU 2FA for banking is required by law which usually comes down to either an Android/iOS app or a chipTAN device. That's why browser isn't an option for me. Sadly I don't think waydroid passes the basicIntegrity check of AOSP [1], so emulation is out of the picture too.
I used a pinephone as my daily driver for about a month. Importantly, this was 3~4 years ago, things could be better now.
My take at the time: The battery life was bad, the phone was slow, MMS did not work, making a receiving calls was iffy at best.
I really really hope this improves/has improved over time. Android gets more and more difficult to de-google. A linux phone would solve a lot of privacy issues (not all, but some)
It sucks that GrapheneOS supports only Pixels and nobody came along and ported it to other devices, although less secure.
But "Android gets harder to degoogle" is not true. Pixels are just way too expensive
I'm waiting for devices to get the 5.10 kernel or the ones after it, so I can run supported KernelSU builds and take my life into my own hands.
Forget the pinephone as a daily driver. It is nice to play around with and having linux on your phone is awesome. But you can't really use it as a daily driver. You'll try it and it's going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects. Trust me, I own a pinephone and I know other people who do.
There's nothing wrong with it. Just like 50 mild annoyances with anything you're trying to do with it and on top it's super slow, compared to any other smartphone.
As I read, the phone by Purism isn't much better and it's really expensive.
So I've heard. Quite unfortunate
Yeah, I think so, too. It doesn't have to be this way. I mean this is mainly due to the way ARM hardware works, lack of good drivers, maintenance and dedication by the manufacturers of that hardware. And everything is quite fragmented. In theory we could have a hardware platform that has good open-source drivers and is well-supported. The Pinephone was an attempt to establish one platform that people could focus on. But it has quite some limitations and also hardware/design issues.
And Linux isn't quite there yet. I mean I love Linux and it can run on embedded devices very well. But things like connected standby (for example receiving chat messages while the hardware sleeps and saves power) just isn't implemented in a desktop environment that was made for computers. And also not in a chat application that was made for computers. So, set aside the hardware and driver issues, we have another issue with Linux software that wasn't made to run on smartphones.
There is a way around that and that is to add those capabilities to the Linux kernel. And also give applications means to stay connected in the background, adapt to different screen sizes, rotate the screen and evict themselves from RAM. It's kind of what Android is. It builds upon the Linux kernel and adds lots of stuff that is specifically useful on smartphones.
I hope someday some of those techniques get adopted into the mainline Linux kernel and also the frameworks the desktop software uses.
I hope so too. I wouldn't be as mad if Android was open and we could put it on different devices, but we can't. Manufacturers lock their devices in so many ways.
Thanks for your great reply
Thank you. I completely agree. We can't do stuff ourselves, my Pixel 4a is End of Life now and all the proprietary parts of the system won't be updated anymore, which is a shame because the hardware is still perfectly fine.
And I hate the business decisions Google makes. Android is built upon Linux and the core is supposed to be free software. But then they move more and more stuff into their proprietary Google services packages. Like the proper keyboard with swipe typing, the better calendar app, text to speech, push notifications and all of the payment stuff. I personally replaced everything on the phone with a custom ROM, and did not install the google services. But I had to find alternatives to all of that and some things really don't work as well. It's a hassle and some things just don't work at all. Like some stuff that requires in-app payment. I don't care too much, because I get most of my Apps from F-Droid anyways and they're open-source. But I can't pay with my phone in the supermarket, can't rent those silly electric scooters and a few other things.
The problem is not Android. It is as open as any other Linux distribution. The problem is that manufacturers make the drivers for their hardware proprietary.
Would really love to but have yet to see basic phone functionality covered in a way that isn’t a painful compromise. Stock Android is a privacy nightmare, which is why I left it. I had some fun with Cyanogenmod back in the day, maybe there’s another de-googled Android distribution around today but since I last checked I couldn’t find one that runs on modern mainstream hardware without really jumping through some crazy hoops to establish root.
Cyanogenmod became LineageOS. It can be run fully de-googled or with Gapps.
GrapheneOS is also worth looking at.
Both run on modern hardware and are super simple to install.
I would have to dispute your claims on this one. The only really modern mobiles running Lineage OS (by modern I mean released in this year and the previous year) are perhaps some European Xiaomi/Realme devices, maybe a couple of Samsungs, the last-gen OnePlus and some Motorola devices, and the Pixels.
As I have been complaining for a long while now, the entire custom ROM market is moving towards the Pixels, which is a dreadful move in my opinion, but what I can do
It's mostly up to which manufacturers allow boot loader unlocking.
The pixels are somewhat a continuation of the nexus line which were more developer centric.
Motorola edge 30 runs just fine and has done practically since it launched, typing this on it now
Will definitely give these a look, thank you for the updates.
Can you speak to your experience with any of these? Would love to hear a first hand account!
I ran Lineage on my OnePlus 5 for a few years until I replaced it with a Pixel 8 last month. The first thing I did with it was install GrapheneOS. I have not had any issues so far.
I'm not that person but I've been using GrapheneOS for about 8 months now. Setting up an esim was probably the worst thing I had to do but it was still relatively easy. Lmk if you got any questions
I have a Mobian community edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and it is my daily driver. It suits my humble needs, but these few years have been a mixed bag. Especially with Mobian I've had periods of it working great, punctuated by periods with annoying issues. I stopped using the phone for a while when it suddenly stopped taking calls but I didn't notice since there was no indication of trouble. My family reported me missing when they couldn't reach me after a few days. Luckily that was then sorted out, but it wasn't great. This hasn't happened since.
postmarketOS has been pretty solid and seems to perform better than Mobian.
After a few years I'm starting to think I need a new battery, but the official store has been out of stock for a while. I'm not sure if they will ever get more parts. Communication from Pine64 has also slowed down to a crawl, which is not great. At least their official monthly blog was last updated in august. At the moment I'm somewhat skeptical of their future. We'll see.
Be warned though: the PinePhone can browse the web and banking probably works, but watching, say, youtube is not going to be a great experience. You're probably better off using alternative solutions like Pipeline. The PinePhone is not a powerful machine and you will have tinker every now and then.
Having said all that, if you set your expectations correctly you can probably get along with a PinePhone as your daily driver. I'm not sure if I can recommend it because there are many caveats, but in the end you know your needs and what you're comfortable with better than I do. I like my PinePhone and I surely wish more people get Linux phones and that the ecosystem evolves.
I could not find an official support branch of postmarketOS for the PPP.
Other than that, as you say, Pine64's interaction has waned greatly and I wonder what is going on behind the scenes. This is no FP5, certainly, but availability of parts is a requirement for me
Been using a Librem 5 since May, and am typing this on it now. I love it.
Nope. I would like to but as long as android does an okay job I will stick with that.
Yeah Linux phone is a pipedream as long as Android works well at all.
The fact that you can use Termux kind of makes Linux phones moot, especially since you need a very specific set of hardware
What inconveniences have you faced from the software?
Copying my edit here: I am willing to watch content and use banking apps from the browser. Do you think it'll be fit for me?
I used a pinephone for a week or so, but people got angry at me, because calling me was impossible. Apart from that it is a slow but very interesting device. Mine is broken now, because I somehow managed to fry the wifi chip. I used arch btw.
I'd love to run a system without Google but it's hard. I tried to run LineageOS with microg for a week or two but eventually had to install Google Play Services. Lots of hurdles with push notifications and unfortunately some apps really refused to work when they detected no play services installed. It really sadden me, to be honest. Really wanted to make it work.
Never gave Linux phones a chance, I rely too much on apps that wouldn't be available.
I'm interested in the problems you faced. I have realised that I will need GMS/MicroG for maps, and am unclear if I can get a FOSS app to host my local mail inbox without GMS. Other than that, everything else can be done in the browser (technically even maps can be used in the browser but I digress).
Would like to know which services prevent you from leaving Google
Me, GrapheneOS!
No jokes, I found a Oneplus 3 with broken Display, will fix that and try some distros. But the choices all seem pretty bad tbh, I would like Fedora Silverblue but I guess that doesnt exist... yet.
Maybe I will try to create a custom Ublue image?
Why not try lineageo OS? I've been daily driving it for one year now and it's reliably if you don't throw magisk modules at it for fun.
I threw magisk modules at it for fun and it's still reliable.
If you have bootlop saver you can throw whatever. I have like six of them
Would love to. Seems like the only real option is the Purism phone but I was burned pretty hard by one of their laptops. Don't want to roll the dice.