Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?
thefoggiest.dev147 points by ingve 16 days ago
147 points by ingve 16 days ago
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.
It is kind of extreme. I personally daily drove the OG Pinephone for about a year-and-a-half, back in 2020. I bought in during the postmarketOS edition.
I'm still dealing with the fallout from the choices I made in order to conform with that phone. And at the end of the day... I got nothing out of it. Nothing but issues, problems and inconveniences.
The modem eventually stopped working for some reason, and I moved to an iPhone 7 that had been abandoned for quite some time.
It felt like I had let out a breath I had been holding in for years.
Would you be willing to talk about the fallout you refer to?
I might have been a little dramatic.
It mostly boils down to the fact that I can't really face the shame of admitting that pretty much everything I did was a waste of time and effort and returning to using proprietary, hated private solutions.
Read: messaging apps, banking, apps for work, basically everything.
As a layman in terms of security and operating systems, is this actually more secure or private than using iOS in lockdown mode and communicating via iMessage? Feels OTT for anything you might talk about in a personal relationship
A lot of privacy fanatics (myself included) are also open source fanatics. I like to be able to wrap my own tinfoil hat even if it is harder and a bit more uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable yes, but you need to pay attention to details that big tinfoil fashion can't be bothered with. For example, you can't use Reynolds wrap because it was modified with preforations for the government. They say that was to keep your Jonny Wurster's from smoking crack, but obviously sub-nanometer waves..
I'm usually wearing a simple double-williams wrap with a D-battery on top for charge. Keep safe from those 5G's, friend.
Does this mean that open source is more important than privacy to people of this mindset? Again from my layman’s perspective I would expect the hardened iPhone, using iMessage and key verification, to be more secure.
Well, first of all I think if something is open source it will tend to be more privacy-focused since it will disclose what it tracks. People will either find that acceptable or fork and change.
> Does this mean that open source is more important than privacy to people of this mindset?
Not exactly, but I think the questions should really be something like "who is the guarantor of your privacy?"
If you are happy with it being a corporation like apple then you're fine. I'm not, and what we consider more secure would have to be a much deeper conversation in which we actually define our threat models.
True, I’m very interested in understanding how secure the open source alternative is, I struggle to believe it is as secure as there are so many layers, and the surface seems much bigger. I guess if you are worried about being hacked then the open source method is likely less secure, but if you are worried about being monitored then Apple is more of a risk as you don’t know what goes on behind their servers etc.
My general stance is that the fewer things I need to trust the more secure I am. That goes for services, companies, dependencies, programs, etc.
Besides that there is also all of the transitive points, like what does apple trust? What does google trust?
I'm not sure if I'm more secure, but I am sure that I have less people influencing my security and that I have a reasonable way to validate them.
i feel you, but these downsides have nothing to do with a linux phone, but with your friends privacy preferences. i am trying to be like that friend, except that i keep more communications channels open. i mean, verifying contacts face to face is one thing, but then we ought to at least have one unverified channel to arrange a meeting or a video chat.
also there are more safe options, like deltachat that don't depend on a phone at all. if we live in the same city we could have regular hangouts where we'd be able to meet without any prior arrangements. or if we know each other well enough you know where i live, or have contact to family members.
this is a matter of priority. i keep using the chinese wechat despite privacy concerns because it is the only way to stay in touch with friends and family in china. i long refused to use it, but as a consequence some friends from that time are now lost.
but outside of china matrix and deltachat are the best options even with android. and matrix unfortunately isn't even that good[1]. it still fails some times, and it is difficult to maintain a server and keep it spam free.
[1] matrix is getting better, but the key handling is complex, and at least one seurity minded friend rejected it in disgust last year when for unknown reasons at one point the encryption between us failed and we could not talk to each other. it's a problem when even tech oriented people privacy minded people reject matrix.
> but with your friends privacy preferences.
Network effects and human nature combines to make this a completely insurmountable obstacle. You'll likely never convince even a sizable minority of your own friends & family to do tech things the hard way because you think it's more private that way.
That is the argument in favour of being a bit more mainstream - you get to interface with the rest of humanity with much less friction.
It was the easiest thing of all time to get friends and family onto Signal, actually, before the idiots took SMS out and it became just another confusing messenger app.
No, you don't understand. They need the developer bandwidth and velocity for things like their sketchy cryptocurrency and GIPHY integrations.
They can't waste the time they can use on shitcoins for something like SMS.
I had a similar experience with GrapheneOS. There is a balance in act between continuing down the privacy rabbit hole versus being able to communicate effectively with your social circle and it is easy to double down on privacy at the cost of relationships if you are not aware of how it is affecting others.
I have my own problems with GrapheneOS, but I thought they made a great effort to make sure that it didn't really have that kind of downside. What problems did you hit?
I put all of my social media apps on a secondary profile or in Private Spaces. Never got notifications and checked the apps very infrequently. Not a great experience when i would take hours/days to respond to people I'd imagine.
I suppose that if you use GOS without Google Play Services, you'll have a hard time using lots of services like WhatsApp etc.
Not using platforms in general and GAFAMs in particular goes beyond privacy issues though, especially outside USA.
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...
It's an Android device with an old unsupported kernel that runs a hacked up Debian-ish userspace on top of Android layer. While that may be good enough for some, it's not what some of us want.
I'll stay with my Librem 5, which is also totally usable, runs actual Debian, runs Waydroid too, and does not bring me Halium pain.
I have been using an Altair 8800 as my daily driver for about 50 years now. It's really not a big deal to enter instructions through the switch panel, especially with good gloves, and it does basically everything I want it to.
Good for you, though I prefer my device to be reasonably capable for real world tasks and hassle-free while providing me the ability to run the latest software and to hack on it however I want. Otherwise I would stay on N900, as I still miss its keyboard.
Most of what I have read has indicated that the Librem 5 is NOT a great daily driver (which was a huge letdown for me). How do you like it?
Looking at what's missing from their roadmap here: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
No videos? Fine, I rarely take videos.
No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it.
No GPS? This one would be a deal-breaker for me.
But depending on the person I can see it being usable.
That image is seriously out of date. Bluetooth, GPS, and even recording video all work fine.
That's great to know; but Purism really ought update that, I'm sure they are losing sales from that being so out of date.
Video recording implementation could be better though, but other stuff works well indeed :)
In fact all things from that chart are there and have been there for years now, including 20h battery life and encrypted SIP calls.
20h battery life? Mine comes nowhere close to that with all hw switches off and only playing mp3's... Are you quoting a when suspended figure or something?
It can get up to 20h either when idle with all hw switches off or when suspended with the modem on (less with poor signal coverage, of course). Looking at a power meter right now I'd roughly expect at least 12h of music playback.
Using the latest greatest stock pureOS?
My L5 gets nowhere near that listening to MP3s on road trips.
Check whether you get a high load average whenever Wi-Fi kill switch is off. If so, keeping it on and turning Wi-Fi off in software may give you better results. There are patches to fix that, but they need more work not to cause troubles with older cards (Redpine).
There was also another issue that may have caused interrupt storms when kill switches were set to off, but that has been already fixed recently.
There are some small power consumption improvements coming in kernel updates soon too, though these shouldn't make a drastic difference, just an extra hour or so.
Ouch. It seems to be even more incomplete than I thought. The lack of Bluetooth and GPS is kind of surprising, since those things have worked on Linux laptops for at least a couple of decades or so.
Both work fine on Librem 5 as well and have worked for years now.
Then why haven't they updated their site to inform potential users? It would make me worry it's about to be an abandoned project. I've dealt with enough of those in my life.
>No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it.
For most people, it can be difficult to predict future scenarios for Bluetooth that's unrelated to wireless earphones. I always use wired earphones and didn't think I ever needed Bluetooth and always had it disabled. However, I was later forced to use it to configure new devices. E.g.:
- internet router (Eero) from ISP has no buttons or a status display so required Bluetooth on smartphone to configure it
- battery backup power station (Delta Ecoflow) require Bluetooth to configure them
The common theme is for device manufacturers to avoid adding elaborate LCD displays or touchscreen interfaces to the actual device and instead -- offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.
> offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.
And an app that eventually gets delisted or whatever and your interfaceless device gets turned into a pumpkin...
At least we can hope - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...
Last week for the first time I've used WebUSB to configure flight controller for my drone/wing. Felt like magic.
I'm just a single data point, but FWIW after the first week the only time I ever (literally) dust off my librem 5 is to show people what a joke of a phone I waited 4 years for. Purism had the right goals (mainline linux kernel, no run-time loadable closed sourced blobs, user-serviceable, hardware kill-switches) but the implementation is only worthy of a participation trophy. The phone would randomly drop calls (though I've heard this is finally fixed), the UI was terrible (UI elements rendered partially off-screen, a useless maps application that complained about a missing location service), the battery life is so terrible that carrying around a 2nd battery is common advice, and the hardware was anemic back when the phone was announced which made the difference even more noticeable when the phone finally came out half a decade later.
I'm glad I own the phone for the same reason that I regret not holding on to my G1 (the first android phone): Its a neat piece of history. But alas, it will never see use as an actual phone.
It works fine for me, I'm typing this on one right now. I'm still waiting for something that could replace it as it gets older, but I don't see anything viable out there yet.
The question is whether you're able to live without Android & iOS, perhaps with some limited help from Waydroid. If the answer is yes, as it is for me, then it's a great daily driver.
The lengths people go to for a horrible Ui/UX and app experience is bewildering. I guess they justify it by not caving into Google or Apple. Of course, all of their privacy concerns and safeguards go away when the credit cards, utilities and services they use all circumvent their precious Linux phone. But hey, at least you’re running Linux on your phone, right?
Can you provide more information on your claim? If I use a credit card in app A, what privacy-violating info can app B get?
It is unclear to me what alternative you are proposing, apart from bending to Google and Apple?
There is no alternative. Unless you pay by cash and have verified that all of the utilities and services you consume are not laundering your data then you’re just wasting your time by putting up with a horrible phone OS experience.
I don't use GNU/Linux on my phone for "privacy". It's an added benefit, but not the point.
I use it because it's familiar, hackable and respectful to my attention. It works the way I want it to work and it's capable enough to fulfill all my needs. Switching to Android would be a downgrade on all these aspects. I'm aware that it would be an upgrade in some other aspects that I care about less.
You are right to remind that other service providers such as banks or any online shop do routinely collect and sell an amount of personal data that should also concern us, but a phone in your pocket that is used for virtually everything and that's controlled by a third party raises more concern than just privacy of consumer data.
Digital privacy is futile predicated on paying your electricity bill by credit card? Absolutist fatalism is not helpful.
For completeness sake, here are a couple of other decent alternatives to the FuriPhone:
1. The Volla Phone Quintus, with Ubuntu Touch: https://volla.online/de/shop/volla-phone-quintus/
2. Jolla C2 (or any other supported Xperia device), with SailfishOS: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/Jolla-community-phone
Jolla is really good. SFOS can even run lots of Android apps on an emulator, including banking apps, with zero issues. And the native ones are a delight to use, great indie apps. I wish they got funding from EU and became a completely open source alternative to the duopoly.
Have been running Sailfish OS on my primary phone since 2013 - works fine. Avoids a lot of the Android pitfalls, like being abble to easily SSH in and upload/backup data or total absence of advertizing anywhere. :)
300 euros does not seem much. Worth a try.
> Your purchase includes a 12-month Sailfish OS full license subscription valued at €59.88 (€4.99/month), granting access to all releases, commercial components, and feature upgrades. After the first year, you can choose to continue your subscription and support Sailfish OS development further. Even without renewal, your device will continue to function, but future software updates and commercial component upgrades will not be available.
Just a note of something I came across when looking just now. Don’t mind paying for continued development but worth knowing before you buy.
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).
sorry, my comment didn't convey my desired inflection. You don't need your google account. you just need a google account. As in, you can use a throw-away "google account". Or, one could, a year ago, at least.
I get that there's still a google profile on your usage of the device, and i'm sure they have a way to link it to your other profile(s).
>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:
<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
> 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.
Why wait? You can shove your pip/npm uses into docker/podman and remove 90% of the attack surface today. (Provided you don't map your home directory into the containers)
Docker is not a security barrier. There have been plenty of container escape attacks in the past, and plenty more to come.
But I agree it might remove the 90%.
No, Linux containers are a security barrier. They're not absolutely 100% impenetrable, but they're pretty good, and I would generally expect them to be fine against the kind of things most people are worried about getting from pip/npm.
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?
Sandboxing should be built in and by default, not DIY and glued on, like with apparmor and firejail.
"Your car does not come with a seatbelt? Seatbelt parts are easy to order online and assembled on any car, it's your fault for not using one."
> Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?
The whole point of sandboxing is that one compromised app can not compromise the whole system and other apps. Compromised dependency on my banking app on Android or iOS only compromises that banking app and nothing else.
It’s always felt strange that Linux desktops try to make sandboxing and permissions the responsibility of packaging standards. That strikes me as much more of a system level thing like audio or display output.
Fedora Silverblue is this
How so? I'm writing this from an Fedora Sericea, which is Silverblue but with Sway instead of GNOME. Atomic Fedoras solve only package hysteresis (your package manager being unable to reproduce the intended system state because of unaccounted for changes) by generating the root file system with OSTree. It has nothing to do with sandboxing the applications themselves.
It does in the sense that all the applications you install will be via flatpak, so they get sandboxed that way. Of course it depends on how locked down the sandbox is configured for each of those applications.
The S in Flatpak stands for Security.
Flatpak is primarily a convenience mechanism for app makers. Any security boundary you may find in it is optional, all defaults are always toward not breaking apps. Apps pretty much uniformly either silently get read access to all your files, and even when that is not true they often get permanent read-write access to any file you open in them.
Go look at the permissions for GNOME Papers. Try to argue that it's "sandboxed".
>Apps pretty much uniformly either silently get read access to all your files
This is outdated information. The situation has improved since the publishing of flatkill with flathub loudly warning about permissions and less apps having full R/W access.
Android apps can be configured insecurely too although less severe, still it's the users responsibility to check and modify permission.
In either case it's a substantial improvement from no isolation at all with much easier handling than other sanbox tools or MACs.
> less apps having full R/W access.
Not good enough when apps can still silently have full access to home and /media without the user even realizing.
It may be in the future, but for now it is no different from Fedora Workstation in terms of security. Please correct me if I am wrong. AFAIK Silverblue has no additional sandboxing or any other improvements to security.
Pretty sure Fedora, being based on Red Hat, has the strongest SELinux policy in place by default, and SELinux is pretty much the best sandboxing option available other than actual virtualization.
Yes, but this was about Silverblue and how it implements some additional sandboxing, which it doesn't. SELinux is great, but maintaining it and creating configs is huge amount of work and where on AOSP, every process is strictly confined with SELinux, on Fedora, not so much. Not to mention the additional software the user installs. Not at all comparable to real Android or iOS sandboxing.
It's generally only initial work to make the policies to maintain a program, maintaining doesn't even really exist unless the program radically changes in some way.
Fedora is notable because any software installed via repositories has a policy written for it, so it is already far more in effect than you might realize.
It's entirely comparable to Android sandboxing because it's part of the foundation of Android sandboxing.
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?
To be fair, if firefox had the intelligence to know that it was being asked to attach a file it didn't have access to, it could prompt for a password. I don't expect full TRAMP like smarts from Emacs, but I don't see why this wouldn't be doable?
Granted, I'm viewing this as far easier than the sandbox "fake file system" approach? Firefox would be able to see the file exists, most likely, but just not have read rights to it. Yes, you can have some things it can't list, but I would expect that to be low on probability to want to attach to an email?
The Flatpak/XDG people are standardizing the concept of "portal"s for doing things that need help from outside the sandbox. A properly sandboxed Flatpak app can only open files bind-mounted for it via a portal call.
That's exactly my point. Users expect desktop software to read their home directory, which is an artefact of running under the same uid. The same can not be said for server software, where the expectation is different.
Linux desktop environments had the chance to set a precedent here where software could for example have had a directory named after the application under the user's home, and use subuid to access files. That is simply an example, but would be a backwards compatible way to create a shared culture how Linux desktop software operate, and easen a transition where desktop software could be limited to "their" own directory.
Instead they squandered this chance by focusing all effort on moving dotfiles around (.config was such a waste of energy where we the heated debate could have been about something more useful, such as the above). Now we have Snap and Flatpak which both try to solve a culture problem (where we store our files) with technical solutions (bind mounts! modal gui:s! popup dialogs!). These will not improve the situation. In the best case it will train users to click "Yes" more, which we know not to help security.
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 ;)
Completely agreed on this. Linux, by and large, should actually be far easier here? Have a "work account" for your machine where you do these tasks and you are basically there. Switching to a gaming account or your banking/etc. seems easy enough?
- opensnitch
- flatpak
- docker/podman/vm, etc
- /etc/shadow has been around for decades.
- Boot/login with TPM / Yubikey etc around for a decade.
You can have Qubes OS on the certain PCs, in the same way you can have GrapheneOS on a certain family of the safe hardware.
This is a solved problem if you trust the packaging folks for your distro. Most end-users will never need to install some random stuff from npm or pypi: these are developer-specific concerns.
> Most end-users [...] these are developer-specific concerns
I'd wager a bet and say most end-users who end up using Linux are, by one definition or more, developers.
Just another reason not to needlessly update dependencies. To say nothing about the risk of compromising legacy code. And if you are someone who updates your dependencies constantly just because, consider that for many of the packages you are updating into they don't even do that and use some ancient dependency themselves owing to legacy code issue and the fact everyone for some reason wants to rename all their functions and flags every major version change.
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.
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 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
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 maintain the PinePhone for pmOS. It's my only phone and I've been using it without major problems (not including temporary regressions) since 2021. I use it for calls, SMS, camera, firefox and a couple of Android applications in Waydroid (Element X, Doordash).
Can't speak for the other user who says "degraded in recent stable release"; I use edge and I'm not aware of any issues, and latest stable is as stable as edge is.
Edit: Actually, one "degraded" in the last few months is that GTK dropped support for hardware acceleration on the PP's ancient GPU (2008, GLES 2 only, gtk requires 3 now) so GNOME-related DEs like Phosh use the CPU for rendering now. It's still snappy enough for the way I use it but it might be slow for videos and such.
I now use PostmarketOS as a daily driver on the old standard Pinephone, and it looks good to me. After trying a few recent distributions PostmarketOS seemed to work best.
Before PostmarketOS I used Arch on a Pinephone Pro for 2 years, but I think it finally updated itself into oblivion... The software never reached a really stable state, but I was surprised, that it worked so long.
In the beginning of the PinePhone I think Mobian worked best, but the most recent version didn't look as good as PostmarketOS to me.
I'm daily driving the latest stable (24.12 now) on a Librem 5 with no major issues. VoLTE calls and SMS work fine although I couldn't care less as there isn't much reason to use unencrypted legacy comms in 2025 when we have Signal, Matrix, Delta Chat, XMPP, etc.
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 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:
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.
The OnePlus6T supports it, it will still display a warning but it will be locked.
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 ...
Alright, perhaps "routinely" is a strong word, but all my phones run non-stock and I don't buy devices I can't do this on.
All in all I must have installed 3rd party roms on 6-7 devices with good results.
Recently picked up a Moto G Power 2024 as a cheap way to play around with Android. Never signed in with Google. Use Thunderbird / Firefox. Mixplorer for files. Most Google services & apps disabled. Use Obtanium as my main way to install apps, with a few from F-droid too. Have Aurora for anonymous Play if I need it but so far have just used it for Dropbox.
At the heart of this is Netguard. I'm using this firewall as a whitelist. Blocking network for everything except for the things I approve. So far, this seems to be working well.
It's been a great experience. Have ended up using this device more than my iPhone. Still has the stock ROM but, with the bad stuff disabled, it hasn't gotten in my way. This feels like it's truly my own device in a way that's rare these days. Main drawback is the lack of future updates.
Get a pixel and immediately flash GrapheneOS. The appeal of GrapheneOS is it uses the same AOSP android that Google uses, but with all Google things stripped out. So you have 1st class support for all firmware and software features and a really polished experience out of the box. You even get to use things like the awesome Google camera that doesn't phone home.
You can even sandbox some Google services to get things like maps working.
> Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
Totally, get a Pixel phone and put GrapheneOS on it. You get state of the art hardware and the latest Android hardened for privacy and with optional Google services. That is, you can install and remove them anytime like any other app.
Do you have to install a whole new distro? I just managed to get past the signup screen, then deleted the "first use" app and disabled Google's apps.
Yes, you need to flash their image. They have a web installer from the browser and the process is relatively straightforward: https://grapheneos.org/install/web
Easily ? I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy S21 as a backup and am posting from it right now (from Firefox). Never associated a Google account.
The issue is that it's just a stop-gap solution : we ought to strive to remove our dependence on Android/iOS(/Xiaomi) entirely.
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.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. My experience with the N900 (and the N9 later) was pretty decent. The N900 was way ahead of its time. I got it in 2010. popped in a 32G µSD-card and I had 64GB, which was already a lot. The UI was amazing. True multitasking on a phone. IIRC the iPhone at that time wasn't able to do that. usable HW keyboard, headphone jack, two cameras, proper two-stage camera button, a little stand to prop it op, replaceable battery, IR emitter (there was a tv-b-gone app!), FM Transmitter to hear audio in any car...
It was a (small) brick and the resistive touch display + stylus was not perfect, but okay.
The software ecosystem was not good, though. Userbase was small. And when Nokia finally dropped it, it remained the first and last of its kind, so noone was keen on keeping developing for it.
Meego was getting better, and Sailfish is actually really ok.
I'm "temporarily" (4 years now...) using Android ("/e/os" - what a stupid name), but since I do not want to use any Google Services, I feel that it's always just whack-a-mole to get the app you want running on the device and have it properly working...
Both me and my brother had an N900 each and we both had an awful experience with them. My brother worked at Nokia at the time so he's lyrical about Nokia phones to this day.
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.
Smartphone addiction usually just means using one or more of the social media apps... (Twitter, YouTube, instagram, reddit etc...)
All of them work just fine on the mobile browser on these Linux OSes...
What you'll get stuck with is the lack of useful smartphone apps like bank apps, payment apps, navigation apps etc...
> it has been surprising how much you think you need to record your HR and workouts
Start a martial art instead :) Things like jewelry, fitness bands and watches aren't generally allowed during training and will only last for a few sessions even if allowed anyway.
That should get you used to not monitoring everything.
I'm trying to imagine how few things could and couldn't if moved from iPhone:
1. Does bluetooth headphones work? Kinda dealbreaker to go back to cables.
2. Music apps? Soundcloud web app probably ok. I don't use Apple Music much, but I know they have web app.
3. I don't even dream HomePod or HomeKit support. I use HomeKit to open my house, but probably could move it to Home Assistant.
4. Messenger/Instagram web apps suck balls, but I manage to cope.
5. Government Id app - this one ties to phones hardware. Very useful but I'm not extremeley dependent on it.
6. Car Key - dealbreaker to go back to keys/cards
7. Payment card - it's been a decade or so since I use this.
8. Myriad of apps that technically don't require a phone to operate - could probably have a burner phone for this - DJI, Eufy, Tuya, Deye, Wyze, Ewelink, Aqara.
9. EV charger apps - afaik none of them have web interface. Keyfobs are an option, but another thing to loose.
10. Supermarket loyalty apps - screenshot normally works
11. I assume some sort of video calling app exists for it? Is it cross platform?
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/
“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).
The year of Linux desktop already happened in 2006.
That's when I switched to it full-time on my desktop and never looked back. It's the only success criteria I care about :)
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've been daily driving a posix compliant unix desktop since mac os 10.4. It has been picked up my friend. Somehow people forget that mac os is the most polished desktop unix distro.
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 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
Getting it to boot is barely even a first step.
If the author especially liked the camera of that phone, it was probably because of the custom app that interfaced to the sensor.
Getting good photography on a linux phone has been one of the enduring problems. Akin to overcoming custom graphics drivers for early linux SoC development.
Like the other (currently top ranked) comment, I highly recommend the furiphone as the current peak of linux phone development.
I‘m looking for Liberux. This is an european (Spain) development. They got actually their first dev board.
Probably a silly question, but what is the smallest modern phone one could get new, to run Linux on and have at least basic phone and sms functionality working?
I haven't used any of these but unihertz makes some truly tiny android phones. I see that people have put Linux on the titan, but the jelly line is where the really small phones are. Unfortunately, afaict, those are stuck on android for now.
Privacy of things aside. My phone has more compute & ram than my computer did many years ago.
There is no longer a _need_ for a mobile platform like there was years ago. I would love to run any software I want on my phone.
Problem is these days, "first to market" mentality ships software with a lot of bloat and it is tolerable bc PCs are very powerful. So as phones got more powerful, software got more bloaty.
I have a pixel 9 pro, in the android beta there is a "terminal" app that launches a Debian shell inside a VM. You can choose to resize the disk as large as your storage can offer, and all apt aarch64 packages are available including docker. Really impressed with it so far. This is a similar experience to crostini on ChromeOS, but gui apps are not working yet.
I was able to ssh out to one my servers, then ssh into the phone from my desktop forwarding x11. I then successfully launched x11-eyes and a few others. Hopeful that eventually you can run a desktop or at least x11/wayland apps all self contained on the phone. Pretty cool to tinker with for now.
Because Android and iOS serve other masters.
Its's not just that this is morally unsound, it's fucking infuriating. Imagine JD Rockefeller had arranged it so that your pen and paper constantly nagged you and tried to trick you into buying things.
I'm calling it now, society is going to collapse and it's going to be because of software and hardware working together in tandem to make life miserable and expensive and only accessible through authorized devices and apps for the best possible experience.
(I do have a PinePhone Pro, and it has its own problems, but they're merely inconvenient rather than life-draining.)
Digital fascism is the future. The majority don't care. A friend wanted to stream a clip from YouTube with me on discord and actually chose the completely DMR ridden YouTube Discord app instead of just streaming directly from YouTube.
Why would someone make that their first choice? I don't know but they do.
It's the present, for several years. And if you're connecting discord with youtube you've already lost. :-D
Fascism is our actual governance system - if you define it as 'government and corporations working together', as Mussolini did. It is just that we are mostly under the illusion that we live in a democracy.
It is long in the planning that software and hardware work together - look into technocracy. Smart anything = spy. Smart meters are tools to monitor resource usage. Smart phones are spying/reporting on you. Ai will guide you.
You will be irritated and fined to death if you do not conform with the plan.
Global warming, terrorists and child porn are the various justifications given to justify whatever-new-loss-of-privacy/resource extraction is required.
Even so, individuals will be fine. You don't have to willingly give up your heart and soul to join the borg. That extra yatch/holiday/holiday home will not appease your true self. How many times do you need to come back?
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?
> 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...
Those are very relevant for a Linux laptop, but much less so for a Linux smartphone. An AOSP-based distro like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or /e/OS paired with Termux provides almost a all of this, with the added benefit of ART - quite possibly the most polished runtime in the Linux ecosystem.
You can even plug a bluetooth keyboard and run Emacs on your Android / AOSP phone nowadays.
I currently run LineageOS and am constantly frustrated with its limitations every day.
On desktop linux I can quickly write up a program to do most anything I want in pretty much any language, and in my text editor of choice. I don't know anything about android development and I don't really want to invest time in learning Google's proprietary GUI toolkit when QT/GTK, or even raw OpenGL is more portable. I once looked into it and gave up when it seemed like it was going to be very painful to write an app outside of android studio (why is there not just a CLI tool to compile these things?). On vanilla linux I can whip up most things in under an hour in C, Rust, or even Bash.
I think it's painful to write an app inside android studio, it's just pain you accept if you want to do android development. Professional pain so to speak, you're paid to suffer.
You absolutely can write something in C, Rust, Go, or whatever on Lineage. Just install Termux and the relevant packages (e.g., pkg install rust, etc.).
AOSP is still vanilla Linux under the hood, just with a touch interface on top. Plus, ART is open-source and works great for GUI apps.
Right, but that is still severely limited in my experience.
Like I can't bind these programs to run on keyboard shortcut (or I guess the mobile equivalent would be a button on the home/lock screen?)
I can't do basic UI-- even if I don't write a QT/GTK app sometimes I want to pipe to imv, mpv, present a list of options via dmenu/rofi, send a notification to dunst/mako via notify-send, copy strings to the system clipboard, write a script that calls wtype to emulate keystrokes, etc.
I don't have access to the whole filesystem too, right? Last time I tried writing a script in termux I couldn't access the photos my phone took.
One concrete example: I use music player daemon to play music throughout my home. On the phone the answer is to download an app that implements the protocol, but the app isn't great. Instead, I wish I could bind dmenu to open up when I press volume up for example that just shells out to mpc. These are the types of things that I like to set up on my desktop to get a really ergonomic experience tailored to my workflow, but on mobile I'm at the mercy of what apks are available.
I also haven't found any great solution for setting up a phone declaratively. On desktop I can use NixOS to codify my configuration, on mobile, flashing a new OS means pecking around settings/fdroid like a point and click adventure game for an hour to get everything to a somewhat usable state.
Perhaps this is all just user error and everyone else has figured out how to do these things, or they just suck it up and build their own android apps. But for me, this is really what I'm asking for when I say I want Linux on mobile.
> Plus, ART is open-source and works great for GUI apps.
This requires writing the app in java and building it in android studio, right? Is there an easy way to just compile an apk from a non-android project?
Also if I invest a lot of time in learning ART and building apps for android, I will have a much worse experience running these apps on desktop linux (for example under waydroid) which is where I spend a vast majority of my time.
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.
I switched from Nokia N900 to Librem 5 that I'm writing this from and I'm still enjoying these things. I miss the keyboard though.
Yes, hardware keyboards are another good thing from the past that got lost...
All the Linux phones that i‘ve used have felt very sluggish, even if they were pretty recent models.
GrapheneOS on the other hand is very snappy.
Of course that's why we use and love GNU / Linux, because of snap and snappiness!
_ No GNU/Linux user ever
Please take my freedom in exchange for snappiness and security.
_ (a)NO(ther) GNU/Linux user
Users have the right to a secure deGoogled Android Linux after they give Google hundreds of dollars for a Pixel. _ Stickard G. Pallman
Why does it have to be either freedom or snappiness?
Do you get the linux phones for free as opposed to paying for a pixel phone?
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.
Not just Nokia - at least Trolltech and Motorola had their own stacks, and Openmoko predates Android release too.
In fact, it was Nokia's stack that was the youngest one out of all these, as Maemo had no telephony capabilities pre-Android.
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.
> it's already free software
I'd just like to interject here for a moment. The word Free Software has a specific meaning that AOSP does not meet. The only component of AOSF that is Free Software is the Kernel, due to GPL, and aside from low-level Android-specific modules such as binder there's no secret sauce in Android kernels; even the vendor modifications are mostly gutted out in favour of Project Treble and GKI. Everything else is only Open Source and not Free Software, and even then developed privately and only published upon release. Because nobody releases a pure AOSP phone (Google Play Services alone changes the OS behaviour dramatically, punching through all the usual app sandboxes) and the source code for the modification, it's effectively proprietary with open source components.
Which one of the four freedoms is not met by AOSP?
Don‘t Linux phones also rely on binary blobs?
My bad - I forgot that Free Software need not be copyleft. The point on Android still stands tho, and the freedoms on AOSP are decresing by the day as well.
Try getting a patch into android vs getting a patch into a debian package and tell me how it's the same thing :D
It makes sense because it gives you complete control over your device, to a level even AOSP can't touch.
> 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.
We‘re talking about AOSP Android here
It cannot be compiled as it is, so it's nothing that runs on any phone.
I definitely would switch to Lineage or /e/OS or anything more vanilla if I had a Samsung phone.
GrapheneOS is completely open source and based on AOSP. As is LineageOS. What‘s your point?
I know right, when will Android vendors actually release security patches on time?
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 ?
The same people who decided the meaning of words like "who", "decided" and "that": all of us
I have a Volla X22 (or whatever) with Ubuntu Touch. I can send SMS messages, I can call people, and I can listen to music. That's about 80% of what I want a smartphone for taken care of (and the music wouldn't be necessary if there were decent MP3/OGG players which support OPUS, but alas, smartphones killed portable music players).
I did jump through some hoops to install Firefox and get it working with the phone's touchscreen keyboard so I can use digital bus tickets rather than physical ones. I also went and installed Waydroid so I can use WhatsApp for my kung fu club when it's needed.
There are a couple of bike rental companies in Belgium which require one to install an Android/iPhone app to use their services, but I have decided not to give them the time of day.
I too am looking for a Linux phone as a daily to decouple from Google.
Currently using a Fairphone with \e\OS. microG is prone to crash on the latest system update but not a big issues. Navigation work just fine too across the USA.
Ordered the FuriPhone and tried to get it in before the Tariff Wars. Currently waiting for it to enter shipping limbo from the manufacturer.
Hoping that the USA Government's treatment of foreign counties helps ignite the push to move away from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Linux and BSD are most likely to benefit in the tech transition. Lower cost to bring up infrastructure and features allow for removing larges USA corporations as daily drivers.
I'm getting tired of all the Enshitification those companies are jumping on to as the new business model.
P.S. We need to stop using the "Gated Community" analogy when speaking of Apple and Google with phones. A real gated community allows owners the addition of more personal security; guards, cameras, and security systems. Apple and Google do not allow owners to improve security; firewall, direct backups, and removal of useless applications. The closet analogy I can come up with is "Prison Community".
> Many will point out that a Linux phone is less secure than Android or iOS, but that highly depends on your personal threat model.
99% of people should live their lives without a personal threat model.
Anyone tried Linux phones for daily use? Not those Android ones, but real Linux. Just wondering how it works in real life compared to Android/iOS?
I've been reading Hackernews in the morning and call/texting on my Pinephone for a few years now. The polish(and many times functonality) level is far less than Android/iOS. Depending on what you need/want will dictate if you could use it. For example all the Android/iOS only stuff I just ignore. And I haven't yet gotten GPS + maps to work though it seams like quite a bit of that is in place. If you have specific questions I'd be happy to have a go at answering them.
PostmarketOS on a Liberty Phone (upgraded Librem 5) works fine, and just gets better with each major update which is twice a year!
This isn't like a paper notebook at all! I carry two of those every day and they never, ever kernel panic.
I have a FreeBSD VM on my iPhone but I'm not using it for any phone-related tasks.
You couldn't even if you wanted to, right? Doesn't apple have pretty crazy restrictions on VMs?
One of these days I'll get a phone that can run Genode's Sculpt Movile OS.
same here, i daily drive linux on my phone, ditched the prioprietary OSs long ago
How are you dealing with companies that force you to use an Android app? There are so many services in daily life where people just expect me to have an Android/iPhone device. Those things are increasingly difficult to achieve in a different way.
Not the parent but I'll reply for myself. I have a Librem 5 as my personal phone which I take with me when I go places and use as my daily driver. I also have a Pixel running GrapheneOS with work and personal profiles for the few times I need to run an Android application but it more or less permanently stays at my desk. The Android applications I have on that phone are banking (required to use Zelle at my bank) and management applications for various devices (ex: managing settings on my bluetooth headphones). I don't need to use those often and when I do it can wait until I'm back at my desk where my GrapheneOS phone lives.
spoiler: i dont. i dont need to, simply. my bank can be accessed fully through the website, and that is how i use it. most services i have i use through email or some other form of interaction that does not require an app. i simply do not use these services, and thus i dont need to even have an app for them. if im lucky, it will work on waydroid, but i dont have a lot inside waydroid. so, yeah, it is easy for me as of now at least.
This is also my approach. I use the bank websites. If any dirty fiat banking cartel or other group try to force their app down my throat, I simply take my money and go elsewhere!
This is the only way we can solve this. $$$ is the only language these crooks understand.
I get that the appeal of using a Linux phone is being able to say “my phone is a Linux phone” but you could also just say that about any phone anyway. Most people will just nod when you say that and occasionally somebody will get incandescently angry. That is fine, good even. Variety is the spice of life
Still using my Librem 5 (2 years in).
Still works.
Still like it.
I don't want a phone, I want a pocket computer (with connectivity).
phones need a standardization moment so they end up like desktops so anyone can run whatever they want on them
I have heard good things about GrapheneOS
Me too. Too bad it can only be installed on Google hardware. Instead of giving $$$ to a surveillance corporation, I'd rather give it to small Linux phone vendors who are on the user's side from day one!
GrapheneOS is riding on decades of Google-funded development and is thus pretty great. Linux phone development never had that kind of funding but we are getting there slowly but assuredly through user funded development and community involvement.
Have read this with one thought: "I don't deseve this shit"
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 :)
How can you compare iOS or Android security with desktop Linux security?
Have you checked what it takes to achieve those 0-click root exploits on iOS or Android compared to a desktop Linux distro?
Not even in the same league.
Have you checked the time it takes apple or any android vendor to fix anything vs the time it takes a linux distribution?
Months vs hours.
Sounds like a vendor issue also present on desktop. Just get a pixel and enjoy first class update support with GrapheneOS.
What makes you think it's not encrypted? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Full_disk_encryption seems to indicate that support varies a bit by device but it's perfectly doable.
Note that the initramfs is stored without encryption or signing. So while your data won't be leaked when your phone gets stolen, it should be considered compromised if you get it back.
Sure, lack of secure boot is a tradeoff. Of course, by the same token you can just reflash the boot partition and fix that.
How does flashing work, who controls the writes? I remember reading about hacking the controller of an SD card to override the read/write functionality.
I think if the bootloader is overwritable, it could lie to you about reflashing the boot partition...
It varies by device. Obviously something has to handle writes, but generally it's a lower stage that isn't easily writable itself.
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.
I actually run Waydroid on my Linux phone because of 2FA. All my personal 2FAs are just TOTPs in a keepassxc DB synced between my phone and my PCs (accessed via gnome-secrets on the phone). But my $dayjob requires MS Authenticator in the "here's a 2-digit number, open MS Authenticator on your phone and type them in to approve" mode, so I have to run that in waydroid.