I want to donate to a linux phone. I believe in linux and I want a linux phone. Maybe we can use one in very few years as a normal daily driver. It’s getting closer and closer every month.
I want to donate that we get there sooner. But which project? I’m following postmarket but I’m not sure if they are the most promising. What’s your stance on this? To which project would you give your money to accellerate it?
Edit: I don’t want to buy a phone. I want to support the phone os devs. Sorry for the bad wording.
None. The sad, infuriating truth is that the makers and devs are a lot like this comments section: focusing on how good of a computer it is (or what apps it has).
You do a little digging and beneath all the hype there is a line buried in every review, so as not to raise suspicions, that says something like “now the call quality isn’t perfect, but…” and what they mean is “it will sound like your friends are playing a full concert on a kazoo trying to talk to you.”
Time and time again. Every linux-based, privacy-respecting, freedom-loving phone team out there seems to have conveniently neglected to make the phone good at being a phone.
There’s a large ecosystem in the Android space. Right now F-droid and Lineage os are making leaps and bounds.
Removed by mod
To people down voting you, it’s important to note that Google-free, pure FOSS Android based OS do exist.
This is what you should be looking at if you want a fully Open Source phone OS, with no privacy issues (no phoning to Google servers).
In my opinion postmarketOS is the most promising mobile Linux OS now. But the phones? Only OnePlus 6 is good. PinePhone is a project to look at as well but the hardware is not as good from the regular user’s perspective
I think the Fairphone 4 is also worth checking out. It works great with Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS seems to be doing well on the device, and there’s developments towards PostmarketOS. :)
Ubuntu Touch is almost dead, Sailfish is proprietary and many many phones have that kind of postmarketOS support. I’m talking about things that are already usable
Why do you think Ubuntu Touch is almost dead? The development community is pretty active. They recently finished the huge task of upgrading to 20.04, and are hard at work getting up to speed with 24.04, at which point they will have paid back a lot of technical debt.
Ubuntu Touch on a supported device is probably the most usable experience you can have with Linux phones as a daily driver at the moment, especially as Waydroid runs quite well on many devices to fill the gaps.
Pine64 has also had terrible communication for a while now and their site has had technical issues for a month. They have not filled me with confidence as of late.
postmarketOS is great though.
Does anyone know what’s going on?
Tbh GrapheneOS.
Android is Linux.
And unlike desktop Linux it was able to spread secure and private standards
- every app is sandboxed, not some opt-in like Flatpak
- apps start with no permissions (or at least very little), everything is opt-in
- it is like 99% unbreaking, immutable, it just always works while my desktop Linux broke all the time
- there is a webview, which can be hardened. Not Electron, which is insecure and bloated
- energy saving etc work like a charm. 1% battery loss over an entire night!
- hardware security with trusted element is decades ahead of desktop Linux (Ubuntu is just now getting TPM encryption support)
- it is a unified platform, with tons of apps, many of them essential (as the platform is so secure), like 2FA, Banking, public services etc. you can have a full FOSS phone though
I am sure excited for other operating systems but they are just toys. GrapheneOS does amazing work that is a 100% alternative today, for real phones with normal prices, good performance and outstanding security.
how are you only getting 1% battery drain overnight? my pixel 7 w grapheneos drains 10% overnight and battery saver makes it worse somehow
I would like to know your secrets
6a is good. The 7 is said to be bad.
Removed by mod
These people know zilch about security
Agreed, now your mission is OpenBSD
Let’s watch if your shit got cared, you can only attacks small projects with peoples who don’t want to write portable code (amd64 and aarch64 only) for “security”
Removed by mod
Android is Linux.
This should be repeated in every “Linux phone” thread.
It’s also possible to install a full GNU userland using Termux, and nowadays a graphical interface is even possible with Termux.
When i think of Android i don’t think of it as part of the gnu/linux ecosystem, but a heavily modified linux kernel turned against the user.
Being pixel only makes me cry
Removed by mod
Almost everything you said here is false, with the exception of controversy over the developer. However, GrapeheneOS is far from a single developer project, and the former lead stepped down a little while ago.
Removed by mod
harassing and witch hunting any critics
You can criticize GrapheneOS just because Micay will care about your words. But you can’t do with something like OpenBSD because the developers are much knowledgeable and they never cared your words. They maintain an operating system for themselves and will not develop features to please users.
You can only criticize some small project with a developer that isn’t good in communication. You are truly a petty person.
having a little social media army with sockpuppets to do this
No loser, the community is the army. (their quality isn’t better than any Calyx or Lineage). The developers don’t even have enough time to please user with a beautiful user interface then why they would screaming on social medias like you are doing.
But they maintained hardened_malloc and you never take a word for it.
Removed by mod
I think either PostmarketOS or Mobian would be the best existing candidates right now.
Hardware wise, the Fairphone 4 is probably the best option, especially compared to something like a Pinephone.I tried Phosh (Gnome mobile shell) on an exhibition a while ago and honestly loved it.
However, I’m absolutely not confident in those tbh, in terms of reliability. The whole thing is highly experimental right now, and I wouldn’t trust them as a daily driver.
Phosh is also available for Fedora, especially Silverblue (available as ARM iso), since you are, with me together, probably one of the most prominent Fedora Atomic fanboy :D
I see big potential in a uBlue-phone spin maybe. I tried making one myself, but I absolutely don’t have a clue what I’m doing and don’t want any responsibility for such a project.
Do you know if or how we could organise such a project?Thx! Sounds like it’ll be postmarketos
It’s porbably best to connect with ublue devs on their discord
Don’t use Discord, rather use the official uBlue-forum. That way, everything is public, better organized, accessible and not in the hand of some chinese corporation.
The main problem is political not technical. The market had been allowed to become a duopoly and too many critical things now need an app on an Android or Apple phone. The worse I know is banks needing an app for authentication for their online banking. No separate security device anymore, those are ewaste apparently.
Public EV chargers where you can only control them from an app.
Riding book at theme parks. The cases are growing. Even the app is just wrapper of hidden web page!
Frankly I think regulation is required to get competition in the market. Not the only tech one either. Why is it so hard for law makers to see monopoly in tech?
Don’t do this.
Android is already Linux on a phone and it’s bad.
Donate to normal Linux on computers. There is an ever expanding mess of packages that need to be updated, fixed, hosted, maintained, streamlined, back ported and generally massaged into functionality with whatever goofy distro you pick.
Donate to Linux on computers instead.
For the vast majority of people these days, a phone/tablet is their computer, and a laptop/desktop cannot fulfill the same use cases. So if someone makes the very reasonable request for a phone recommendation, telling them to just use a laptop/desktop doesn’t make any sense. It would be like someone asking for a recommendation for a moped, and responding “don’t bother, just get a Ford F150”.
The problem with mobile phones is that they have big differences between each others in terms of hardware, so it’s really hard to come up with a “unified solution”, thus making development really slow.
Right now, the two distributions which came further in development are PostmarketOS and UbuntuTouch, but they are still far from being a reliable daily driver.If the reason you’d like to chip in is not just Linux per se, but FOSS in general, there are plenty of fully free and open source Android roms that are a great deal in terms of usability, privacy and support, notably LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS and the one I chose for myself which is CalyxOS
Edit: when I talk about a phone being a “reliable daily driver”, in my mind I think “a phone you can conduct a business with”, so call and chat with clients, take pictures, exchange e-mails, have a working GPS and Bluetooth. And all of these features must be flawless and always available and sadly Linux phones aren’t there yet.
(also you should get their usb-c powered soldering iron… pinecil )
Pine phone is a nice gadget but I don’t think they contribute to software development as much as Purism does. Not that I recommend buying anything from Purism because of their business practices.
Lineage os seems to be the most promising. We already have F-droid so the apps are there and the good news is that for every component that Google makes proprietary Lineage os is creating and maintaining a free software version.
I would not call Android a Linux. It may have the kernel but it isn’t much GNU in it
It can be free like Linux so it counts in my book. I wouldn’t consider Google Android free but Lineage os counts
For me, the best is e/OS, which is based off of LineageOS, but with extra privacy features to de-google. Just get a compatible phone, and run that.
An Android phone isn’t what’s referred to when people say “Linux phone”. What they’re referring to is a phone running GNU/Linux, typically running one of the GNU/Linux phone shells/desktop environments.
AOSP. Sad but true.
When first pinephone came out I really believed it’s heading somewhere. It thought that it will be kind of like raspberry Pi (fun, cheap platform to play with) and that we’ll quickly see copycats and it will slowly grow the way Linux on desktop did. AFAIK nothing like this happened. You still can’t get a phone with decent Linux support which for me shows that we’re stuck with android. I think most people that would help Linux phone happen are simply satisfied with LineageOS so there’s no incentive to put as much effort into it as it requires.
An Android phone isn’t what’s referred to when people say “Linux phone”. What they’re referring to is a phone running GNU/Linux, typically running one of the GNU/Linux phone shells/desktop environments.
I know and what I’m saying is that all those project are moving very slowly while projects like GraphneOS/LineageOS already offer open, privacy oriented phones with good hardware and lot’s of apps. This is simply where more effort is going, where we’re seeing more progress and our best chance at getting “Linux phones”.
I know
Apparently not.
projects like GraphneOS/LineageOS … our best chance at getting “Linux phones”.
To repeat myself: an Android phone (for example, running GrapheneOS or LineageOS) isn’t a “Linux phone”.
I love my Pinephone, not enough to use it as my main phone thou.
It’s running Mobian, mostly because everything else I have is running Debian in some form, but it looks like the largest project is PostmarketOS.
