I’m quite optimistic about a usable Linux phone in the near future, maybe 5 years from now or so. When smartphones were a new thing, it was really hard for open source projects without a major company backing them to keep up with all the new developments. Hence all the projects that died out. But innovation on smartphones has basically come to a halt these days. Sure, your phone can get a little bit faster and have round displays now, but nobody cares anymore. Nothing of all that is essential. So, give it some time, we’ll get there.
I’m optimistic about the apps and desktop environments. We have made huge progress. But the problem is the hardware support. It seems that there are very few ARM SoCs, which work well with the mainline Linux kernel. So PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC and PinePhone Pro a 2016 SoC. And after all that time and despite community’s efforts to upstream everything, the mainline support is still not complete and we still use custom kernels.
https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/
Yes, but that’s exactly my point. The need for hardware support shrinks if the hardware doesn’t change every few months. A chip from a few years ago is still very fine. That was not the case in 2009.
Ah, good point.
Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don’t do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).
The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android (“vanilla” Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I’ve got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.
The loss of Dalton Durst from that team from burnout was a big hit. They’ve been doing work on it but I haven’t seen anything approaching the output they had when he was heading it up.
Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.
the only device which Ubuntu Touch currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
I’m incredulous that this is the case. You’re probably right but there’s no way in hell I’m using a phone restricted to 2g or 3g.
I am talking about VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which is the protocol just for making phone calls over 4g networks - NOT 4g/LTE mobile data! Ubuntu Touch has worked well with 4g/LTE mobile data for 10 years now.
makes sense, but there’s no carriers in the US for voice calls over 3g.
Yes, while you can still do 3g/2g phone calling in most of Europe, the only hold out in the US for this is that T-mobile still has 2g calling in some areas, but they have announced that this will be shut down sometime in the soonish future (it was scheduled to be all shutdown of April this year, but they announced this was delayed to a time tbd, likely in order to continue to serve all the ATM’s and iot devices that are still running “legacy” systems being used beyond supposed eol). Which is why I reverted to using de-googled AOSP for my daily driver - I like to be able to use my phone as a phone after all.
Asterisk counts as a Linux phone, right?
deleted by creator
Counts as multiple Linux phones
me rn:
I run a pinephone daily during the first 5 or 6 months of covid but once I started going out again well… really poor camera and battery
Can’t do anything about the camera, but there are extended battery cases that you can get. I got the keyboard addon with the battery and that helps, but it’s also pretty big and heavy.
I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn’t even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I’d love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we’re not there yet.
I’m daily driving Droidian for more than a year!
it’s a fun toy, not super useful but probably fun to tinker with
I’ve done some ungodly stuff to my android phones (even non-rooted ones, I’m totally abusing them) and I can’t even imagine all the possibilities with a proper linux distro. Having a pocket pc with a full arm64 linux sounds awesomeBought a pine phone because it’s cool.
It is not daily driver worthy at all
I use it as my only phone. It all depends on how important freedom is to you and if you are willing to sacrifice some things to get it.
out of curiosity. What were the problems you ended up experiencing? Been tempted to get one being a linux user myself.
Been too long since I last tried it. I think my main complaint was lag and responsiveness
as a linux user my immediate reaction is that those are fixable with good software. Modern phones run like shit because software is bloated to hell.
Although other people have mentioned valid hardware issues too so.
Wifi keeps waking up the phone, draining the battery, then craps out when you want to use it. The camera has like 5fps with 1998 flip phone quality. Forget about multi tasking. It connects to the cell network so calling and texting should work. Want to use an app for something? Too bad.
That’s my experience from two years ago, I had the distro hopping sd card and tried all os versions at the time. It’s just not there yet.
The only use I see is dropping it somewhere and then using it as a jump host over lte, but I haven’t tested that.
I have a PinePhone Pro and if the battery would last longer than a few hours, it would totally work as a daily driver. Fast enough and can do everything I need it to do, but 3-4 hour battery life. If someone can figure that part out, I think it’ll be good enough for at least early adopters.
I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone’s battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.
For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn’t want to install it, but it’s supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.
wifi wakes it up from suspend? Or sleep? I feel like that would be relatively easy to hack a fix for.
everything else sounds about what i would expect it to.
A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it’s a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.
I appreciate the people who daily drive pinephones. They are paving the way for when they’ll be viable alternatives for the masses. (Or verifying that they won’t be, we’ll see.)
I feel like people that unironically tout Linux phones as stable enough are the same people that think we can ditch Xorg, not true even though I obviously would like it to be.
Oh, come on. Wayland is shipped by default by a lot of distros now because it’s perfectly stable and usable in the vast majority of use cases and hardware. For every story about wayland falling down, I can come up with a dozen “stupid shit X11 does now because it’s unmaintained and dev X tries to do something new with his app” stories. I do silly things like run 6 monitors on 2 GPUs on a Core 2Duo, and it runs like a top. If there’s a problem, it’s always something dumb i’ve done like knocked a cable than it is that Wayland has shit the bed. And it’s been working like that for 2 years.
I ran a Pinephone for a year as a DD back in the early days, it was a pain in the ass but it was possible if you were stubborn enough. But it was no Android. But then again, it wasn’t Android.
Spoke on it at the top reply
I daily drive mine and it’s not good, but I prefer that than running spyware.
I totally see what you mean with the GNU-like Linux phones. But what issue could you have with Wayland in the year 2024?
I feel like I might’ve exaggerated the chasm between ditching Xorg and adopting Linux phones, Waylands only problems are really VR (just seems to be dead end outside of SteamVR) and Nvidia feature parity though that’s less to do with Wayland and more to do with Nvidia dragging their feet on Linux, theres also the odd edge case like unrecognised inputs.
For me steam VR doesn’t work in Wayland
GNU-like Linux
PinePhone and Librem 5 actually run GNU/Linux. Same software that you can run on desktop. Only Ubuntu Touch uses Android kernel I think.
Some people take offense in referring to Alpine/postmarketOS as GNU.
That makes sense, but there are other popular mobile distros too. For example: Manjaro ARM and Mobian (mobile Debian).
I know, I got the wording from some online website. Linux phones doesn’t make too much sense to me, I would prefer to just call them GNU phones. The kernel can’t be what defines this group of OSs when the main OS you’re trying to exclude from this group runs the same one. GNU-like is a compromise.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn’t use GNU at all, so it’s not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn’t the name Alpine Linux sound like it’s just a fork of Linux? It’s super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn’t use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it’s definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don’t know if we can call it “Linux”.
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don’t even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that’s what they are mostly designed to run.
it is very easy to stop using xorg, lol
buy an iPhone
-Jobs 4:20
I just can’t get over the walled garden and shit notifications. Like, fuck Google but why can’t I own my device.
Not without real Firefox and ublock origin I won’t!
Grayjay is pretty cool too.
Okay look I get what we’re trying to say here but would it be problematic if I pointed out that Android is also running Linux?
It’s a valid point, but unfortunately your non bullshit options are limited to replacing the OS with something like Graphene or Lineage.
The powers that be REALLY want your data.
I thought you could just use the Android open source project? I thought the tracking was mostly baked into Google’s flavor of Android not the open source product
lineage is significantly more polished than aosp
I don’t know if a phone that uses the open source version as base. Usually they build off open source or google and add in all the manufacturer/carrier bloat. For me to get off One Plus’s built in OS I had to go through this whole process on their website to get the code to unlock the boot loader.
I have lineage os as a replacement and it’s really cool. My mobile internet stopped working on it though :( my next phone is gonna roll with Graphene
See, this is why, yet again, Stallman was right: insisting on “GNU/Linux” is necessary in order to disambiguate between the fully-Free Software OS and bastardized half-proprietary stuff like Android.
Exactly. Even in this community and in this post people keep mixing Linux, GNU/Linux and Android. It’s crazy that even people who use this operating system are confused. Almost always when they say Linux they really mean GNU/Linux. Linux Mint or Arch Linux are GNU/Linux. But Android isn’t and it doesn’t even use the mainline Linux kernel.
The issue of freedom is a separate thing, because even most GNU/Linux distros contain proprietary software just like Android.
And lo, the Apocrypha were born, for they spoke the truth that no man dare admitt, lest they be marked an apostate.
I guess most ppl who are supporting the gnu/linux phone are the ones who want a similar apple like features like how the prism os had promised to provide.
i use Arch btw
I use GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux btw
Same, on desktop and mobile. I don’t know if it’s funny or sad that a community called “linuxmemes” can’t tell the difference between Linux, GNU/Linux and Android.
Isn’t that like claiming all Linux, Android and MacOS are just UNIX?
I mean not technically… those products use a separent kernel that has its own development path away from the Linux kernel. Linux is just a compatible Unix kernel but I wouldn’t classify it as a Unix operating system since it diverges into its own thing. Android still uses the Linux kernel not some piece of code that they developed and not some commercial Unix product
GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”,[6][12] chosen because GNU’s design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code.[6][13][14] Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.[4]: 45:30
Not if they don’t share any heritage with Unix. Osx is the only one that fits the bill there.
It also counts in the other way: Apple licensed the UNIX™ trademark.
Meanwhile me absolutely running a dualboot Oneplus 6 with lineage and droidian that has had kupferos, mobian and postmarketos in the past… (yes, i distrohop my phone, so what?)
I would totally daily drive a Linux phone if performance wasn’t so awful. I don’t care if it doesn’t a have any apps. In fact, the inability to install apple or android apps is actually a positive point in my view.
