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.
Is that because of a shitty microphone and speaker in the phones? Couldn’t just use some headphones to solve this?
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
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?
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.
Oh I thought they weren’t planning to update it further than 20.04
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.
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.
How is it turned against the user? Androids Linux is highly restricted in that it doesnt support a lot of things, but that makes it extremely stable, while this doesnt mean that apps are also “stable” like in Debian
They don’t expect users to do development on android.
(Phones should be used like telephones lol.) I’m going to buy a landline phone
No a phone is an end device. But I dont think GPL or whatever says you need to be able to modify the code on that device.
Makes no sense.
Btw as I only said this in another comment, afaik android runs a tailored LTS linux kernel. It is not as bloated as regular linux as it contains device drivers and also doesnt need all the random drivers for whatever hardware to run on a specific phone.
So you can say android restricts freedom in exchange for security, but “linux kernel turned against the user” makes no sense. Their kernel is just fine.
Their kernel is just fine.
It is just fine, yeah. The things that restrict what the user can do is the interfaces.
@scratchandgame @Pantherina i only have an issue when they dont upstream any of the functionality they add… buuuutttt… a lot of the progress linux has made in recent years has been upstreamed evil corporation™ code so… i dunno… mixed blessing
???
Android is Linux.
It runs Linux but it isn’t a “Linux phone” in the sense used here.
Yes I know but the Term is simply incorrect. I dont have a better one though.
And even though I am excited to use some Linux Distro on a phone I own, it will be way worse in stability, security and crucial app support than Android / GrapheneOS.
the Term is simply incorrect
LOL
I dont have a better one though.
I just say non-Android Linux systems. GNU/Linux if I’m talking about that type of system, but there are some like postmarketOS that are strictly not in that group (it’s based on Alpine)
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.
I have a 6a, which I tolerate for GrapheneOS. The battery life is absolutely terrible.
For me its 2 days when I use it rarely.
The 6 series was when google introduced the tensor which is where the stereotype for worse battery life, worse performance, and less efficient radio come from.
I have a 6a too and for the price it’s fine, and I think a lot of the battery concerns are overblown, and for a budget phone competing with other budget phone devices tensor was great. That said the things that would make the tensor in the 7 bad are as present in if not more so in the 6a.
I dont know. I had a 7pro and that thing got hot and was like a tablet. I 100% cannot reproduce this on a 6a. Its battery life is better than my 4a and before my Nokia 7plus.
On GrapheneOS right now typing this, love it! I switched over about 2 years ago to Graphene and never looked back. Rarely have any issues, solid battery life, all my apps work, life is good and private.
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.
It is repeated in every single damn “Linux phone” thread, and in every single thread an answer like this is needed: No, it fucking isn’t. You know exactly what everyone means, stop being a dick about it.
It is repeated in every single damn “Linux phone” thread
Good. The more people pushing back against falsehoods, the better.
falsehoods
What falsehood are you referring to here?
“Android isn’t Linux,” of course. This is a very obviously false myth that is debunked very easily by simply looking at any Android device or the source code. It is not a myth spread by people who are technologically literate. Yet, this easily verifiable fact upsets Linux fans so much they resort to downvotes and ugly language (I have my ideas why, but it’s probably a waste of time to elaborate in this thread).
Of course, the more savvy among the Linux fandom will admit that Android “contains Linux, but isn’t real Linux” - but “real Linux” is yet another myth; that is, the myth that there is more to Linux than an operating system kernel, a myth that leads to further myths such as the myth of fragmentation, or the myth that distributions are worthless and we need a “unified app store.” It’s a myth that clouds history and assigns the wrong motives to the wrong people and meanings to things that don’t need or deserve them (the misunderstanding that that “Linux” is “about openness” or “against corporations” for example, when large companies are the main contributors to and users of the Linux project). Linus Torvalds himself says he only cares about code, not about freedom or openness or any of that stuff (that’s Richard Stallman’s thing)
The fact that this myth is widely believed is not relevant. We don’t live in a world where a falsehood becomes true if it is widely believed; people used to believe the sun revolved around the earth, for example. Also, a falsehood being widely believed doesn’t mean it deserves to stay unchallenged.
The point of reminding Linux fans that Android is based on their beloved kernel isn’t meant to be a well-actually or anything. It’s a reminder that much of what a so called “Linux phone” can do is already possible without having to switch to an operating system that in many respects is not ready for general use. For example, you can run xfce in Termux - I hope this is enough to disabuse one of the silly notion of “not real Linux.” For some reason. people looking for so-called “Linux phones” desire Android compatibility, and it turns out that because Android itself is Linux, it is far easier for Android to run so-called “Linux apps” than it is for so-called “mobile Linux” to run Android apps.
Android is Linux and that’s a good thing. I should point out that it’s not my preferred Linux operating system - I was a Pinephone early adopter and used to daily drive Mobian, I would prefer that or GNU Guix over Android. Still, not only is it a Linux based operating system, it also has its own rich free software ecosystem backed by F-Droid. It’s very usable once you cut out the Google crap and stick to free software only (or as much as possible).
I wrote more on the “real Linux” myth here in case anyone’s interested in more reading material.
“Android isn’t Linux,”
Nobody here has said that. What’s been pointed out is that the phrase “Linux phone” is being used by OP to refer to non-Android phones running GNU/Linux, which is a common use of the phrase.
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.
AOSP is dying as Google is killing off all the apps in favor of proprietary Google ones.
Lineage os is slowly becoming its own thing as they are maintaining basically all of the system apps at this point.
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”.
Not necessarily, F-droid combined with Lineage os or other free software ROM gives you the same freedoms are the Linux desktop does.
You can’t even compile any of those FOSS apps without running propietary build of Android SDK. No one managed to build current versions of Android SDK from the source code yet.
Android is like one big blob and changing anything in it require giant effort. Meanwhile making new feature for a Linux phone with common Linux tech stack is super easy and any mid-tier developer can change something in Phosh for example.
I don’t believe that is the case
Which one? Android SDK source is under Apache licence, but binaries are under EULA. There were some efforts to properly package it under free licencje, but currently no one do it.
As for Android being giant blob, maybe not the best word but it really is barely available to change. If I want to add a new feature to the UI, I need to build whole ROM again and deal with Google’s developing platforms. While on Linux you can get the code for a component from some GitHub/Codeberg and modify/reinstall just that component.
What you’ve said here doesn’t contradict what I said. A phone running Lineage OS is explicitly not what people are referring to with the phrase “Linux phone”.
The benefits are there, some of ideas out of my head:
Better networking for administrator, access to /etc/hosts file, not being tied to a single VPN slot.
Using old mobile phone as a simple server, having access to firewall tools and normal remote control.
Installing simplier graphical interface for eldery people.
Lifetime updates for many system components that are not device specific.
Simple backups and cloning with standard tools like rsync or borgbackup instead of Google Drive. Also backing up whole system.
Everyone can add a feature, you can make a difference, no need to mess with Google’s Android developing pipeline.
Making native apps for mobile and desktop at the same time, no need for bloated web-like abstraction layers.
Apps made in Python, C, Rust… No need to fit into Android SDK. And no forcing Android SDK and Android Studio!
Customizations of the interface look via CSS files (Phosh have it to some sort).
Someone give more ideas?
Oof, now I am sad on the account of what could have been.
Yes, it’s all true but the issue is you can already do a lot of those things with a lot of cheap hardware that is is simply easier to support than old phones. And when it comes to phones being phones Android is really good and has a lot of apps. I think the problem with Linux phones getting more popular is that the overlap between desktop/server and mobile is very small. I mean I use my phone only for phone things and a lot of things I do on my phone I can do only on my phone (e.g. charging an electric car is basically impossible without a Android/iPhone). Having a phone that can do some things desktop/server can do but can’t do a lot of things a phone can do is pretty much pointless at this point.
When we’ll get a proper Linux phone with full Android apps support and convergence it will be really awesome but I just don’t think there’s enough interest to get there at this point.
The problem with Android is it is very invasive and in my opinion untrustworthy. How many of these Android OS’s from various vendors are not kept up to date, with unpatched vulnerabilities because they dump support to force upgrade their customers to the next model, when your phone should still be functionally viable. How many apps in the Android ecosystem are just info vacuums? It’s a very predatory ecosystem and i would prefer a libre solution to these scumbag predatory corporations. It blows my mind how people are so numb to the abuses of these companies, they won’t even consider alternatives. Iphones aren’t a viable alternative either unless you’re into joining abusive cults. I have both a Pinephone and a Librem 5, and they work fine if you don’t mind horrible battery life, i just wish we had more alternatives and I’ll put my money towards that endeavor.
Yes, Android has issues but what I’m saying is that so far Linux on phones really hasn’t been able to compete. No one want’s a phone with no camera, no GPS, no apps and terrible battery. Making Linux phones is just super difficult and sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Android is a good platform with lots of hardware and apps. You have Fairphone offering long tern support, f-droid offering privacy oriented apps and LineageOS offering stable OS. Getting more phoes to support it is a better bet than getting Linux to properly work on modern phones.
This is a problem with the current industry, smartphones are conceptually no different than any other computer. It’s Qualcomm not publishing proper documentation and tools, propietary bootloaders, drivers being baked as Android packages, no specification how main processor can talk to a modem…
That’s just capitulation.
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?
Can’t Linux phones run android apps pretty seamlessly via waydroid anyway though?
Increasingly lots of stuff won’t work without all of the Google services. Banking apps won’t run on root devices or anything odd they detect.
Even without that, I can say how seamless it is.
Banking apps won’t run on root devices or anything odd they detect.
Banking apps will run in Android emulation layers on GNU/Linux.
That’s good, though I still think it’s a problem they exist. I mean a lot of apps are a webpage wrapped in an app anyway, so why not just a webpage and skip the platform dependence.
When I was looking a couple years ago Ubuntu Touch was by far the most developed and stable. Primarily because Canonical poured millions of dollars into its development before giving it up and dropping it, but the community has gone a long way to make it what it is today.
Probably not a popular choice on this community though.
It’s a friendly community, and Lomiri is a great DE that people have also gotten up and running on [other distros].
For the time being it runs better on Android devices than on “pure” linux phones such as the PinePhone, but I have great experiences with it. If you don’t depend on other IM services than Signal you could probably use it as a daily driver on several phones already.
The community is very small and it is kind of broken in a bunch of ways.
Its better to use Postmarket os or something else that’s more flexible
(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.
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?I really wish PostmarketOS worked with more recent hardware, especially some of the Pixel line.
Your welcome to port it.
I’m ngl I think Fairphone 5 might actually be better, I think more of the hardware is supported in postmarketOS compared to the 4.
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.
Look at
startingpoint, I would be down to join effords but tbh I dont have a phone until some kernel gets patched to work on a Pixel 4a (or until I repair a “community supported” oneplus I found)
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”.
No, it’s not like that at all.
The op didn’t ask for a phone recommendation and I didn’t recommend instead that they use a laptop or desktop.
The op said they want to donate to a Linux phone because one day they believe they’ll be able to use a Linux phone. They want to pick the right one to give money to so it’ll have the best effect towards that end.
I said they shouldn’t do that because they can already use a Linux phone and there are tons of other Linux based projects where the money will go much farther.
We ought to be looking at this from a completely different perspective though: op is trying to maximize the value their donation has, and that’s a bummer. They should just donate to the one they like and not worry about effectiveness.
Apologies if I misunderstood your meaning when you said “android is already Linux on a phone and it’s bad”. If android is sufficient for your mobile Linux needs, that’s fine, I use it too. But it doesn’t fit the bill for everyone, and that’s the point of OP wanting to support an actual FOSS mobile effort. The alternatives you list don’t get them closer to what they’re looking for.
You’re right. I didn’t tell the op how to get what they’re looking for.
I told the op that they’re looking for the wrong thing, which is more helpful advice than dissecting the difference between pine and postmarket.
Fair enough!
For all the people using phones as their computer I doubt there would be many who want to use linux. It’s a bit like someone asking for recommendations for a moped and you tell them to build it themselves.
I’m all for wanting linux on phones and supporting that but I have never ever known someone to be interested in linux and only use a phone/tablet. I can’t imagine working a CLI with a phone keyboard.
The point of Linux on phones isn’t to have a phone that requires you to constantly fix it with CLI tools. The point is to have a free and open software platform for a device that is increasingly necessary for daily life.
As a side effect, developing Linux for phones would probably help us eliminate the need to reach for the terminal on desktop Linux as well. I believe snaps (which laid the groundwork for flatpaks) were originally developed for Linux on “smart” devices. The whole ecosystem improves when we try to bring Linux into a new domain.
P.S. I use termux (a terminal for android complete with its own tiny Linux environment) from time to time when I need to access my server over SSH. It’s a bit clumsy, but super handy!
It’s not clear to me why you believe Linux on mobile implies typing into a CLI interface using a phone keyboard. We choose to use the CLI when it makes the most sense as an input method for the platform, not because it’s required by Linux.
As the post above pointed out, android is already Linux, so that’s already an option. But OP’s goal would be to have a FOSS phone given that phones are increasingly the computing device of choice for people, and there are very few feature complete FOSS options in that space right now.
I’m not saying it is CLI, I’m saying that I don’t want CLI on my phone. Android for instance is based on linux and isn’t a CLI for the most part.
Again, why I say it’s like asking someone to build it themselves when people who only use phones and not desktops/laptops don’t typically want to build it themselves.
Cool then don’t use a CLI on your phone, I don’t know anyone who would.
Android is Linux, you don’t need to build it yourself. That’s not a precursor to using Linux on mobile any more than using a CLI is.
Android is kinda linux, I think most people would find it weird to call it a linux distro. OP also isn’t looking for an android phone when they say a linux phone. For a linux phone there is a lot of build-it-yourself and people generally don’t want to flash their device to install it, especially people who only use a phone as their computer.
Android isn’t kinda Linux, it is actually Linux. It includes other proprietary stuff too, but Google regularly contributes their changes upstream. Like it or not, android is a prime example of what is possible on mobile using Linux.
Yes, I agree that OP isn’t looking for Android and wants to support an alternate option. But here’s where I think our disconnect is: the goal wouldn’t be for the alternate option to be a difficult to use, niche, build-it-yourself headache. That’s never anyone’s goal for anything. The goal is to make something roughly as good as, or better than Android, except FOSS.
It’s just that it takes funding and vision to make something as feature rich as android, and both are hard to come by.
Sometimes the code to make a mouse or any pointing device (TS included) work with a cli can be 15 times more than the cli itself. Cheap low powered devices for the masses (globally) would perform competitively if it wasn’t for all the heavy gui work they have to do.
To which project would you give your money to accellerate it?
I would reign in your hopes of accelerating a project using money, unless you have enough money to pay someone’s salary for a significant period of time.
That said, I’d suggest postmarketOS or Mobian might be the most worthy of donations.
What kind of a response is that? “just give up”, “your contribution is worth nothing”, “your money is useless”, “anyway if you want to do something worth nothing, do it there”.
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.
I found Ubuntu Touch/Droidian the most promising when I last tried to get a good Linux mobile setup. Everything was working and i could run any linux app i wanted. The only problem was mobile data configuration with ISP here in the UK. I would donate to whoever is making the best progress and having the most impact. There is so much variety of hardware with phones that a single (or very small number) of compatibility layers needs to emerge.
I would donate to whoever is making the best progress and having the most impact.
OP is asking who that is.
Apple Vision Pro
Lol, well *I* thought it was funny:-P. You might get fewer fake internet point reductions if you threw in a /s.
@GravitySpoiled
I’ll trying to buy a pine phone as my first Linux phone as it’s cheap. Not great but would be okay for tinkering.
@linux