The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
I won’t hold my breath, but it’s sorely needed, so, we can hope.
That’s funny. I can’t hold my width.
Some people can hold their length, but only in private.
I salute the early adopters who will suffer all the inconveniences of startups so the wider public can enjoy a non-corporate phone in the future. o7
As soon as my current phone is paid off I am going to get this. No more fucking Spyware up the ass.
The project just launched and is a software-first project. We won’t see a Libre Phone available for a while yet.
And if Hurd is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath.
It isn’t encouraging that they “launched” the initiative bit have no dedicated webpage or git for it yet. Seems like going off half-cocked
That said, didn’t hird basically die because Linux gained critical mass faster and peeled off the core developers? It would be nice to imagine another bottom-up mobile OS emerging and stealing the thunder of this one, but it seems like the hope here is that Libre Phone will gravitate in some of the devs from the existing top-down open phone projects. Who knows if that will work.
One thing I wouldn’t count out right now though: China is very much in favor of getting software and hardware monopolies out from the control of US companies. Free/open(ish) LLMs are the big example, maybe they will jump on this to try and break Google’s stranglehold on the mobile market.
Early adopters wont suffer, hope I would be one of them and I love testing stuff
Unless they can get this working with Android Auto or Carplay I don;t see it going anywhere.
I hope they can pull this off because we really need this.
Heard of Hurd, I don’t think they can.
Maybe Hurd never went anywhere but they are responsible for as much of what constitutes “Linux” as the Linux kernel is. Linux never would have amounted to much without GCC, the GNU tools, and the GPL.
I’m celebrating!
As a linux phone guy this is good news. Any more pushing towards a more solid linux phone environment is a big plus.
I’m not holding my breath either hence “Hurd” project be amazing if this will be faster than 20 years. I’m hopeful at least.
Removed by mod
Why do you troll like Trump tweets?
Because Our Lord and Savior will spare me in the upcoming months.
Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”
All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.
When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.
So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.
I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.
When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.
Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.
Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.
Fair point, I thought Proton went back farther than that.
I think my overall point is right still though, Linux gaming (native or otherwise) has become not just viable, but in some cases objectively superior to gaming on Windows in terms of raw performance. Pretty amazing, and in even less time than I originally thought lol.
Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”
And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.
Oooh, I wonder if they’re going to pursue a free phone based on Risc-V. It’s a longshot but if they pull that off, it’d be like feeding two birds with one scone.
I really hope this is super based
Honestly as long as they can fucking get something moderately priced that supports VOLTE and a decent camera I’ll buy it
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone. Or at least any more so than Android is a linux phone because it uses a heavily modified (almost unrecognizable) linux kernel.
There’s nothing in the article that says they’re just going to use a mainline linux kernel and throw a touch optimized version of some existing desktop on it (ubuntu touch, etc…)
Heck, they could be meaning that they’re planning on making their own heavily modified kernel for their very own OS so as to skip all of the trouble that trying to make mainline linux into a handheld device has been so far. (similar to I believe how SailfishOS is doing it)
Finally, a GNU/Hurd phone! /s
Why couldn’t they just use usual Linux for that? Why a modified kernel? Is Linux as is not suitable for a phone?
Can’t they just, idk, make a distro? Maybe from scratch? Pop!_OS is working on COSMIC. Can’t they have their Linux-based OS, perhaps with its own things as needed, such as a phone-optimised DE? Or whatever the phone equivalent of a DESKTOP environment would be. A Mobile Environment, perhaps
If my laptop had touch screen with no other method of input built in, and were way smaller, could it not run Linux? Or is that different altogether?
Linux by design gives the user enough rope to hang themselves with.
And that’s certainly not a problem when dealing with tech enthusiasts who know what, when and where to touch to avoid messing things up. But when you’re dealing with getting a phone into the hands of ordinary people, that isn’t going to fly because all of those people will at some point start mucking around inside and then expect tech support when they mess up.
For mainstream adoption, the linux kernel must and the desktop environment must be at least somewhat locked down.
Between capabilities, namespaces, control groups, mandatory access control (AppArmor etc) and other mechanisms, I think there are plenty of ways to reduce user access to any part of the system.
We have immutable distributions already, that is something that isn’t a problem. It’s replacing those pesky proprietary blobs used to talk to the hardware that is a headache.
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone.
Likewise, a so-called “Linux phone” isn’t necessarily a libre phone, either. But, I don’t care about Linux, I care about freedom, so a LibrePhone is important regardless of what Linux fans think of it, and if it is truly worthy of the word libre, it will be able to run your so-called “real Linux.”
Does anyone claim so? And does it matter much outside of (potentially) app support?
I’d rather see a stable OS and ecosystem for good, Free apps that we can flash onto existing devices. I’m quite happy with my Fairphone (repairable! modular! ethical!) and we know that building and marketing a device is painfully expensive.
Let’s make Debian or Arch just work on most phones instead of trying to compete in a saturated market.
Let’s make Debian or Arch just work
Wonder why that’s extremely rare on ARM devices, especially those with modems, and rarely works beyond proof of concepts on some very specific devices? Its not like you’re the first to have this idea.
There isn’t much concrete information, but my guess is that OS/ecosystem is exactly what this project is, and that they are not talking about physical hardware. Specially considering that they are putting the emphasis on free software (not hardware) and they are involving a software developer. Making a phone’s hardware free would be an entirely different beast.
In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone.
Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s. “Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we’re very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world.”
Let’s make Debian or Arch just work on most phones
You have no idea how any of it works, do you?
Fighting closed source drivers, blobs, configurations, entitled users who want everything to work perfectly is not a child’s play. Having control over the whole device like this project is huge.
work on most phones
A lot of the world can hardly get an unlockable phone.
Mobian is Debian designed for phones. PostmarketOS is another project doing the same thing, but with an alpine Linux base.
This is the original article
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-turns-forty-with-a-new-president-and-a-new-campaign
Interesting interview with FSF’s new Executive Director Zoë Kooyman if you are curious about her/where the organization is at.
https://fossforce.com/2025/03/zoe-kooyman-on-post-stallman-changes-at-the-free-software-foundation/
Thanks !
Please god, help me find my keys! Tell St. Anthony I need my keys!
Also could you make this Foss phone be real and reasonably priced below the cost of a gaming PC?
Why would anyone think that FSF is capable of releasing a unique and good device? It’s gonna be a bog-standard Android device with some software modified/removed.
Might be ok for some people still though. Also I’ll be happy to be wrong about my cynicism.
It’s gonna be a bog-standard Android device with some software modified/removed.
Really? That would be heavily antithetical to everything they do. I expect it would be a Linux distro (like PostmarketOS) with some blobs removed etc.
Because as much as they’re ridiculed today by libcucks of OSS, FSF was a formidable force of software once. At some point in history literally the only way to avoid paying absolutely insane manufacturer license fees for things like compilers was using GNU tools.
If they put their ass into it, they can pull it off tbh
