I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone's release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I don't daily drive one but I've been keeping a close eye on it and here's my opinions: postmarketos seems to have the most momentum out of any distro (you can see device support here). I do believe it will be viable eventually as a lot of work is actively being done. This month they announced two grants that were accepted for 4g volte calling and firefox on mobile improvements. They are also working on porting systemd to alpine so that gnome mobile and plasma mobile can be run without any workarounds. Also the oneplus6/6t seems to be the most hopeful for a daily driver.
tldr: I don't think it's currently viable but work and money is currently being put towards projects to fix that
It depends. It's viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it's probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven't checked the status in recent time. And then there's this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won't have any chance if you're dependent on such an app (thankfully it's rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).
Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular "platforms" for mobile apps that establishing a "third" platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it's open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it's hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you're not "limited" anymore. (At least if you consider it "limited" when you can't run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be "limited").
So I think it's less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.
[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]
To your point, I tried for a bit and truly the one thing I couldn't live without was Signal.
The Signal Linux client isn't working on a phone?
Signal is also one of my essential apps, but I wasn't expecting a problem there, as I've Signal running on my desktop and laptop.
Phone just not beefy enough or what is the issue with it?
Flare? It's hardly complete. Can't even use it as a primary device.
As for the desktop app, it's not exactly mobile oriented.
Ah, ok
Not being mobile oriented is a very valid point.
Thought, that it maybe still is enough to work with, but yeah, I can imagine that it's not really nice handle on mobile - and probably no notification support etc
Also the "desktop" web app requires to be paired with an instance of the mobile app.
I wished moxie would spend a little less time flying helicopters and trekking in Tajikistan, and reflect on the need to support non proprietary platforms.
Ah, yeah right
Completely forgot about that
Gonna pull your leg here and say Android or, as I've recently taken to calling it, busybox + Linux + Google
Actually android uses toybox not busybox 🤓
Actually thanks for the akshually, because I had no idea about its existence
Ah okay and yw.
No bc of camera proprietariness
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Droidian yet. It's the best of both worlds: You get a Linux phone with Phosh and an actual camera + sensors working due to the Android kernel. Check it out here: https://droidian.org/
It supports Waydroid out of the box, allowing you to run Android apps such as Whatsapp, Bitwarden and even Google Playstore, etc.
The new Firefox is miles away from what PostmarketOS offers. The only downside is you need a supported device, as per https://devices.droidian.org/.
So yes, I do drive Droidian daily, but I have an Android phone nearby just in case I need something specific.
SailfishX is a usable daily driver with decent Android app support.
BUT: you’ll have to be okay with dealing with random annoyances like:
-> Your default weather app lost the ability to get weather data.
-> Some Xperia 10 III devices lose audio after some time when using GPS. Unless you are in Finland, then you are fine. Nobody knows why.
I use postmarketos with phosh. It's kind of viable, but it has some infrequent bugs. For example sometimes, quite rarely, the call menu may freeze after the call and not respond to touches until the reboot. The camera doesn't work at all. But there are positive aspects, an ordinary Linux terminal and the usual convenient console programs. :)
It has sufficient list of programs: browsers (I use firefox), ebook readers, fractal (matrix), telegram, maps, that works good enough on mobile at least for my daily use.
I run Ubuntu Touch on a Google Pixel 3a xL with Waydroid/Aurora store for Android stuff. So far it works fine for what i need.
Is Whatsapp working ?
slightly off topic. but this project got whatsapp running https://lemmy.kde.social/post/2232894
Its like wine but for android, it doesn't run a full-fat android image like waydroid.
fwiw: it was viable when i had the first android released to the public; it was an HTC and with debian.
So, 15 years later we're worse off than then? Argh.
Out of curiosity, was it "just" a plain Debian system, or did it support touch screen and phone service?
Around that time we had the Nokia N900. For me it was the perfect phone. Debian as a base with Nokia's (unfortunately proprietary) apps on top of X11. You could just recompile Linux apps like Gimp and it worked. Apps that were made for Palm's WebOS worked.
Pidgin's libpurple was used for all the instant messaging so just about any protocol just worked without any need for extra apps. You could easily hack the underlying system. People added functionality like using the light sensor as a button. Angry Bird's first release was on that phone.
I miss it dearly. It was killed by Microsoft. Nothing ever managed to come close. That little 128 MB RAM machine had better multitasking than modern 8 GB phones.
androids can't do base distro's anymore?
the touch screen support was TERRIBLE, but it was helped a lot by the physical slide-out keyboard and i never got the phone capabilities to work correctly, but i heard from my colleagues at the time that some of them had figured it out.
androids can’t do base distro’s anymore?
I'll be honest, I never tried. Seeing that there are projects working independently to bring Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch to Android, I'd guess no? Plus I know you can run any distro in an emulator within Android systems, but that feels more like a curiosity.
The biggest hurdle is getting a phone that you even can install a custom ROM or different OS. 'mericans and yuropeans can get their pixels, pinephones and similars easily, other places cannot.
Every phone in europe has to have an unlockable bootloader, Although, thats useless without a custom recovery support.
How are all the AOSP-based OSes, like for instance GrapheneOS, not Linux distros?
There are apps made for linux that don't work with android, and there are apps made for android that don't work with linux. That's enough for me to consider them different
Also android just doesn't use the basic mainline kernel which is what most people want when they say "linux phone"
They dont use GNU or glibc or systemd
Lots of distros don’t use systemd, and a few non-AOSP distros don’t use GNU userland or glibc, Alpine for one.
Just saying what some guy told me.
It is also a highly modified kernel, extremely reduced. They do all filesystem stuff in userspace for example, which is pretty cool. And they add a ton of garbage out of tree drivers.
glibc is key here, it's what most linux distros use. One of Google's vendor-lock moves was to start using their own libc implementation, making it incompatible with everything else.
I can imagine that theirs is safer and more suited for targeted devices. Linux is extremely generalistic and has a ton of cruft.
But I have never looked at their code or tried to port a Linux app to Android. The #Krita devs might have some insight here.
I can imagine that theirs is safer and more suited for targeted devices. Linux is extremely generalistic and has a ton of cruft.
For targeted devices so is Gentoo. Their edge is having access to proprietary drivers.
But I have never looked at their code or tried to port a Linux app to Android. The #Krita devs might have some insight here.
If it's written in portable C you can use the Android NDK/SDK to cross-compile it for the 4 archs they support. I do it at work.
So how is this vendor lockin?
Not an actual lock-in as they (still) provide tools to cross-compile and the source is (still) available, more like a vendor push-out if you insist.
When people want "Linux" on their phones they're talking more about the ecosystem than the OS
Does android count?
tried pmos with plasma mobile but the browsers were buggy because of my SOC having bad graphics acceleration support in the mainline kernel
No, none of them are. I tried 2-3 versions of it, none is good. However, Android on the other hand, which is also linux-based, is good. Go for Murena's e/OS, or LineageOS.
No. Maybe. Why not?
Android is a Linux distro, just because its not gnu or running whatever subset of features a desktop Linux might have doesn't make it any less of a Linux distro.
The real question is what do you consider a part of a "Linux disto" that currently isn't available on android?
The only thing linux about android is the kernel, i wouldn't call that a linux distro and it's not even compatible with any others.
The only thing about Linux IS that its a kernel. Its not like BSD where all the tools get developed together and released in the same edition, Linux is a kernel, full stop. Anything built on top of the Linux kernel is a Linux distro.
Can you name something other than the kernel that would be considered an essential element of a Linux distro and not available on android or BSD?
Its always been GNU+Linux, even stallman acknowledged its a separate thing and distros without GNU or glibc do exist on desktop too.