Really a shame that Nokia gave up. The N900 was a well working Linux phone. I miss it dearly.
I have fond memories of using my N900. But I would not have described it as well working :) It worked, sure, but not particularly well.
It definitely worked better than a Pinephone. And even with its puny RAM it was better at multitasking than a modern Android phone.
Ms did it to nokia
My favorite phone by far. Absolutely loved combined messenger built into OS and that GUI is still unmatched by any OS as far as I’m concerned.
Is sailfishos linux?
Yes
That works if youre kinda an enthusiast. Not saying its perfect. But it works. for context I’ve run a librem 5 and a pinephone and they both are not there yet imho.
True. It was absolutely useful in the Android 4 era when it first came out. Jolla phone was more advanced and useable than contemporary android devices. Android simply has far more resources to truck on.
Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don’t do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).
The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android (“vanilla” Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I’ve got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.
the only device which Ubuntu Touch currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
I’m incredulous that this is the case. You’re probably right but there’s no way in hell I’m using a phone restricted to 2g or 3g.
I am talking about VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which is the protocol just for making phone calls over 4g networks - NOT 4g/LTE mobile data! Ubuntu Touch has worked well with 4g/LTE mobile data for 10 years now.
makes sense, but there’s no carriers in the US for voice calls over 3g.
Yes, while you can still do 3g/2g phone calling in most of Europe, the only hold out in the US for this is that T-mobile still has 2g calling in some areas, but they have announced that this will be shut down sometime in the soonish future (it was scheduled to be all shutdown of April this year, but they announced this was delayed to a time tbd, likely in order to continue to serve all the ATM’s and iot devices that are still running “legacy” systems being used beyond supposed eol). Which is why I reverted to using de-googled AOSP for my daily driver - I like to be able to use my phone as a phone after all.
The loss of Dalton Durst from that team from burnout was a big hit. They’ve been doing work on it but I haven’t seen anything approaching the output they had when he was heading it up.
Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.
I’ve been daily driving Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 4 for over a year. I love it, even if some features are lacking. Calling and text is stable, but unfortunately Volte support is still missing. Waydroid is also working great.
I’m not sure if Ubuntu Touch is GNU/Linux, since it uses the android kernel I think. But it’s not android either.
Hey linux friends, what are you doing on your phones that a pinephone doesn’t cut it?
Leaving my house for over an hour
I’d say the big issue is how much extra effort things take to do. You are relying a lot on web pages instead of applications and a lot of them don’t feel really well optimized. Actions that would normally take a minute might take four minutes.
There’s some issues with native apps too. When I was using my PinePhone I don’t think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know the UX and was looking to actually pick up a pine phone. I will continue my research!
I have a pinephone and a pinephone pro, and they are basically just fun linux toys. I keep it in my bag in case my regular phone breaks during travel. It does text and make phone calls. Battery life is pretty bad, but i always have battery banks on me.
The only real daily use ive found is as a security camera monitor at work. Also I run easytether on it and my android to skirt tethering fees when needed. Occasionally when on the road, i need a proper linux install to do something. Ive used it to troubleshoot networking things as well.
If anything its been more of a raspberry pi replacement than a phone replacement for me.
GNU/Linux phones may not be, but Android/Linux is quite usable. Jesus should know the difference.
When Android was still new, lots of people thought of it as “Linux for phones”.
They weren’t wrong. Linux technically is the kernel. The toolkits used to build the apps are really what most people think of when they use the term though.
But it’s not the same Linux kernel that we use on desktop.
I have a PinePhone. ama
How much did it cost, how long have you had it and what are the most obvious pros and cons?
In the US store it costs 200$ for the original PinePhone and 400$ for the Pro version. The EU store is a little more expensive.
I’m not the person you asked, but I’ve had mine for 2 years.
Pros:
- free software and freedom (and with that increased privacy and security)
- runs the same software that you can run on desktop as long as it has an ARM build (a lot of Debian packages do) or you compile it yourself - this includes not just apps, but also terminal programs and servers
- killswitch to power off the proprietary modem for when you don’t want phone carrier tracking you
- like in other modern phones the modem is isolated (here it’s connected over USB)
- multiple distros to choose from
- multiple desktop environments to choose from
- replacable battery
- headphone jack
- replacement parts available in case you break something
- there are some interesting addons that you can buy (https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/#accessories)
- microSD card slot
- you can boot from the microSD card, so distro hopping is easy
- can run Android apps through Waydroid
Cons:
- slow - you are running modern software on an old SoC (the Pro version is faster, but still slow compared to modern phones)
- not all GNU/Linux apps have a responsive UI that works well on mobile
- some old apps might not have touch support
- short battery life - the SoC is not very energy efficient. Possible workarounds: get the keyboard addon with builtin battery (but it makes the phone bigger and heavier), carry spare batteries with you, or buy/3D print a bigger case and use a bigger battery
- runs hot
- GPS isn’t super accurate
- audio quality during phone calls isn’t great
- the non-pro version might not be able to run a mainline kernel, so you might not be able to install a desktop distro on it
- the Pro version should be able to run a mainline kernel, but there might be things that don’t work
- experience with GNU/Linux is required
- sometimes workarounds are needed - for me, on Mobian stable sometimes the modem or wifi don’t wake up from suspend and I have to reset it with a script (I added it to the apps menu for quick access, but it’s still annoying)
- [on original PinePhone] bad camera and the default app can only take pictures - there is a script for recording video, but then there is no preview
- I’m not sure if you can use the camera as a webcam in most software
- [might depend on the model] video playback is not GPU accelerated, so it makes the CPU hot and drains battery and you might be limited to 1080p@30fps or 720p
- you can run a stable distro with old software and old bugs (and sometimes things change very fast) or a less stable one with current software, but then things will sometimes break after update and you will have to fix it (probably more than on desktop)
- on Mobian stable (old software) the proximity sensor acts weird during a call and sometimes you can’t see the screen
- no Xbox gamepad support in Mobian stable (but Playstation gamepads work)
- they keyboard addon isn’t perfect and requires some setup
- with the keyboard addon I can’t plug in any USB devices to the phone and I don’t know why - charging works though
- support for emergency broadcast is only just now being introduced in Phosh (https://phosh.mobi/posts/cellbroadcast)
- uses mini SIM standard instead of micro SIM
- sometimes there is screen flickering in non-pro version
- killswitches could be a bit easier to flip (they are very small)
- [on original PinePhone] poor 3D performance (even SuperTuxKart doesn’t run smoothly), WebGL doesn’t seem to work (at least for 3D)
- not a lot of RAM, so you can’t run too many apps at once or have too many browser tabs open - you can still run Electron apps, though (just not too many at once)
- no push notifications, so if you want to be notified when you get a message in some app, while the phone is suspended, you would have to setup a script to wake the phone up periodically
Awesome list indeed! In case I buy one I‘ll probably start a lemmy community for it.
There is already one: /c/[email protected]. But not a lot of activity there.
Youre a treasure trove of information my friend. One of those lemmings that really keeps this place running with content and helpful stuff at that. Thanks mate! :)
Very thorough list, thank you!
Phosh, gnome-mobile, plasma, sxmo or “unity”?
Phosh is pretty good. I don’t think Gnome Mobile is finished yet.
Plasma and unity both seem to be the ones I come back to. The other three I would mess with, but something about the other two always brought me back.
The good old Linux diversity. I am simply the opposite.
They are all equally capable in my opinion. I really think it’s down to personal preference. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing, but the multiboot SD card images wereVERYhelpful for me.
what carrier are you using it on? sim or e-sim? Do you use it daily?
I used mine on T-Mobile almost daily. It worked okay. Think of early Android days where everyone had their own custom rom and none of them were as smooth as you felt they should be.
Do I need a sim? I’m on Google Fi [T-mo] but we’re all e-sim. I have a data-only sim.
I am just assuming, but I believe a data only sim would work.
There is no e-SIM functionality I am aware of.
Yeah it just means if someone rang the phone would still be routed to my e-sim. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am waiting for the right combination of time and energy to add all my chats into matrix bridges on my server. Not having a direct phone to call would almost be ideal… 🤔
How’s the Android apps bridge? Do you even use it?
I haven’t used it on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro in a while, but Waydroid is solid on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS. Android apps that only need an Internet connection work fine. I installed microG and have push notifications working for Discord and Teams. However, notifications don’t get passed through to the Linux side so they only show if you open the Android UI. Screen rotation doesn’t work on Waydroid which can be very annoying. Apps that use other hardware features such as location, Bluetooth, vibration, access to calls/texts won’t work properly.
How is your battery life?
Five
lol
What do you miss the most?
Getting laid
I’m using Android and am iPhone for business and it’s basically the same. Maybe it’s os independent?
Starry-eyed me bought a pine phone and a librem5, and for both of them it was pretty much turn it on, about 5 minutes of navigating the UIs and suffering the performance, and putting it right back in the box for my own personal museum where they’ll be safe and sound and kept in prime condition until they’re thrown away some day when I’m dead.
Purism has contributed a lot to the software development. They hire developers who work on Phosh (mobile desktop environment). So by buying their phone, you have at least contributed to the cause.
Not reliable as a daily driver but very cool
I hope its stable enough when i stop using my current phone
Here is a recent blog post about someone’s experience with PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
I have the original PinePhone and it seems to have less issues, but it’s also slower and has a crappy camera.
Looks like for me I will have to wait for WhatsApp to be cross-app, and the phone call audio quality will be an issue.
There seems to be some progress with the call audio issue, so it might get fixed soon. As for WhatsApp you can probably run that with Waydroid (but eventually you should switch to some free software messenger).
My bad I have not phrased my sentence properly, I am already using signal and with hopes that WhatsApp allows ppl to send messages to another WhatsApp number from my preferred app here signal then I can communicate with my friends and colleagues
Is Facebook planning to do that?
That’s what one of sources that I read has mentioned about it
Well it is stable, but it lacks most of today’s I would call it “comfort-usability” but the main features are definitely working.
I’m quite optimistic about a usable Linux phone in the near future, maybe 5 years from now or so. When smartphones were a new thing, it was really hard for open source projects without a major company backing them to keep up with all the new developments. Hence all the projects that died out. But innovation on smartphones has basically come to a halt these days. Sure, your phone can get a little bit faster and have round displays now, but nobody cares anymore. Nothing of all that is essential. So, give it some time, we’ll get there.
I’m optimistic about the apps and desktop environments. We have made huge progress. But the problem is the hardware support. It seems that there are very few ARM SoCs, which work well with the mainline Linux kernel. So PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC and PinePhone Pro a 2016 SoC. And after all that time and despite community’s efforts to upstream everything, the mainline support is still not complete and we still use custom kernels.
https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/
Yes, but that’s exactly my point. The need for hardware support shrinks if the hardware doesn’t change every few months. A chip from a few years ago is still very fine. That was not the case in 2009.
Ah, good point.
I used a flip phone for years are you telling me linux phones can’t make phone calls?
If you remember the special procedure needed to not fry your SIM, they supposedly can
thats absolutely fucked, lol. Why even sell these if they cant make calls
Linux phones don’t fry your SIM though? Mine’s fine.
Flu doesn’t kill people though? I’m fine.
Flu has been proven to kill people.
The PinePhone has not killed any of my SIMs, and I’ve heard of nobody else having that happen. Nowhere on Pine64 conmunities. The burden of proof is on the one which made the claim that PinePhones kill SIM cards.
Stop spreading lies like “Pinephone kills SIMs”. And if it truly did happen to yours are you sure the SIM didn’t stop working because of the PinePhone and would have done anyways?
Of course the can. Source: I have one.
Linux phones will need to run established Android apps to get users, devs won’t move where there is no users, users won’t move there if there aren’t apps. It’s almost cyclical
Right now we’re working with people who are exceptions to this, users who want to experiment and devs who don’t care about money.
hot take: No.
Linux phones just need good linux software support. And then the linux user base will switch over, and everyone who isn’t simply won’t use it.
I actually genuinely do not want android developers on linux. I refuse to pay for a launcher. My entire workstation OS is developed by volunteers. Genuinely every single android app i have ever interacted with has pretty much exclusively disappointed me. It’s just a bad ecosystem.
In the same way that the linux community doesn’t need the developers of every application ever on it to thrive amongst itself, the linux phone doesnt need android developers to develop apps for it. It just needs better support for linux applications that already exist.
The only reason I will disagree: there’s already a major FOSS ecosystem on Android. There are tons of high quality free apps that aren’t FOSS
Linux isnt even that popular on desktop, my point is that people will not move if their pre established software use case is not avaliable. I won’t. I know many people who won’t.
And if there aren’t users, there won’t be people making quality software to cover wide variety of usecases and get support, if there isn’t quality software that covers a wide variety of use cases and get support there won’t be users. You need to start somewhere, it’s why the windows phone failed. No devs, so no users, and because no users, no devs.
I still don’t see your point. You’re assuming that android users will want to use a linux phone in the first place. They don’t and they wont. And that’s fine.
The only market that the linux phone has to cater to in order to develop successfully is the existing linux desktop market. The vast majority of those people are likely to want and use a linux phone. Which will actually improve the phone. And possibly even in the future bring in android developers and apps.
I don’t understand why you’re fixing on it growing, it’s just a hardware market, system76 already exists, pine already exists, linux users already exist. We exist as a bubble in a larger space and that’s ok. That’s the beauty of the unix/linux philosophy.
Realistically this is like releasing a 10,000 dollar workstation/server cpu and then having the general public complain about it being inaccessible, even though it literally wasn’t meant for them.
There are tonnes of great foss android apps.
I’m sure there’s a lot of good apps. I’ve used a few good ones, but it’s objectively worse than software on linux.
File browsers have almost universally just been awful. Horrid, and almost completely unusable. I’ve tried more than should exist really.
There are other questionable apps, which exist, do what they claim to do perfectly well, but have no utility for anything particularly useful. Even stuff like jerboa is just generally lacking in features. That is also an experience on linux so not really a huge complaint, but i really genuinely don’t see why people like android so much.
Absolutely yes! I think this is what killed the reasonably good Windows Phones. I liked them anyway. They did what phones were supposed to do and were dirt cheap. But if you searched for any of the top 50 apps you’d find some fake BS. Like when I searched for Pandora you got an app that was nothing more than a 3-4 page summary about how Pandora was the planet in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Progressive Web Apps. Web programs broke the need for Microsoft Windows.
Agreed. Classic story that has been repeated several times over the years. Ecosystem is everything.
Microsoft’s Windows phones were fantastic. They had super nice hardware, high refresh rate screens, better cameras on their flagship models than iPhones at the time.
They were sleek, fast, the Windows tile UI actually worked great on a phone touchscreen. But it didn’t matter to most consumers because they didn’t have apps. MS had their own business apps…and that was about it. Didn’t matter that every other aspect of the phones were great, people couldn’t do what they wanted to on the Windows phones, so they didn’t buy them.
I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.
GNU/Linux is not aimed at people who want the most features. It’s made for people who value freedom above everything else.
I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.
You mean Waydroid? I’ve read that it works pretty well.
Depends, waydroid emulates a whole android system, whereas wine translates system calls.
You are right. But it seems to be just as easy to use.
We need proton for Android apps
That’s just a Dalvik (Java) emulator, should be viable.
We have Waydroid which is close enough. It needs some quality of life improvements for better integration with the native Linux ecosystem but it runs Android apps just fine on Linux phones.
The goal of GNU/Linux is not to make it possible to run proprietary apps (but if you really need to run Android apps you can use Waydroid). It’s to create a fully libre operating system that people can use.
Waydroid runs decently on the pinephone. On a phone with better specs, it might be downright usable for proprietary apps.
Potentially a proton-style layer could really ease transition, like on the steamdeck
What if the app also want’s a locked bootloader, Play Integrity, and whatever else. Like a banking app or Google Pay?
Then you run far, far away from that app. Even on an Android phone I don’t trust garbage apps that require locked bootloader and no root. There are plenty of banks out there and paying with your phone is not a necessity.
Hey, do you still plan on working on your RGB mod for PinePhone’s keyboard? It looked really awesome, but it’s probably a huge amount of work.
I went through probably 20 different iterations of keycaps and got close to one I liked, but haven’t gotten back to finishing the project since I haven’t been using my PinePhone much. I think the main remaining thing is to make an Enter key model and a Tab key model. I want to get back to that project eventually but haven’t had time.
Wow, that sounds complicated. But I’m curious if your keycaps would work better for typing than the default ones.
Not really, it’s been a hassle to get them consistent enough to match the default ones. The small scale makes printing them difficult even after I got a resin printer for the project. I settled on a two piece design that works pretty well but the resin material is not as smooth as the injection molded stock caps.
LineageOS doesn’t support Play Integrity either. Custom ROMs seem to be doing just fine.
There’s the stories about “I have to have Windows because the school’s exam proctor software requires Windows and doesn’t work with Linux” but ultimately that’s not the thing that stops the year of the linux desktop. And banking apps won’t be what breaks the year of the linux phone.
Thats a fair point, i never tried banking on waydroid. Most of the stuff i would need on the go seemed fine though.
Although, as far as tap to pay goes, i could see that getting baked into linux properly. I dont believe apple pay and google pay tap pay are using a different protocol. I may very well be wrong though.
It’s not about the protocols. It’s about business. We can have all the tech we want but until someone is willing to establish relationships with and pay the 3-4 middlemen involved in every single card payment it ain’t happening.
BlackBerry 10 was actually a pretty slick OS that supported Android apps and you could even side-load Google Play services.
I worked in supporting those and I had an easier time helping people with windows phones. 🤢
The rotary cell phone > PinePhone
I gotta say that even though it’s not for me, I’m glad this device exists!
I’d call the based department, but I don’t have a rotary un-smartphone™
That’s cool af
Asterisk counts as a Linux phone, right?
Counts as multiple Linux phones
Lmao, yeah, that Linux phone is definitely production ready.
