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Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

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Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#31

Post by jpnc »

greatgib wrote: post #19

If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs ( https://furilabs.com/ ). I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with so…

>fur iphone

Science has gone too far!

Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#32

Post by holowoodman »

carpenecopinum wrote: post #21
Tepix wrote: post #8

Isn't every Android phone a Linux phone? OK, i guess we want something that is less encumbered and more transparent with more digital sovereignty for the user than the Android that we get from the various big phone vendors. What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones…

For me personally at least a few aspects about this are efficiency and control: The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in p…

Fully agreed as a former N900 and now Fairphone+LineageOS user.

Some more things to add: On the N900 updates were quick, easy and painless to a degree that no current phone OS matches: You just to "apt update && apt upgrade", reboot will only happen when really necessary, otherwise any small component (which are just .deb packages as in Debian or Ubuntu) will just be upgraded and restarted in place, without a big download, interruption and reboot. And most importantly, without waiting for a slow vendor to collect and package up all the tiny updates into a big 1GB package that can then be delivered weeks late...

Also, Backups. The only backup solution for a non-rooted phone nowadays is "use our cloud, trust us", and even then backups are always incomplete, because an increasing number of apps set the "no-backup" flags and do (or not do) their own thing, selling you yet one more cloud subscription just to get your own data into "safety". And even with a rooted LineageOS, backups are still a huge pain and incomplete. On the N900, you could just run any old normal Linux backup software, and be done. Imagine, your phone just sending its stuff to your company tape library, no hassle!

And (didn't try this, but should have worked): remote management. SSH into your users' phones to do stuff. Run ansible/puppet/..., manage them like any old Linux box. No tedious mobile device crap management that doesn't really do most of the useful shit, only works on half the hardware and in the end is just yet another cloud lock in by some vendor.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#33

Post by fsflover »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #3

This website is hostile to scrolling on mobile, I've never seen a worse UX pattern in my life. But for me, I see so much potential in Linux phones, but after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup, I won't hold my breath.

I'm already using Librem 5 as a daily driver. It challenging sometimes but also brings a lot of nice features like running desktop apps (Firefox with all plugins!) or native terminal.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#34

Post by immibis »

Tepix wrote: post #8

Isn't every Android phone a Linux phone? OK, i guess we want something that is less encumbered and more transparent with more digital sovereignty for the user than the Android that we get from the various big phone vendors. What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones…

The term "Linux operating system" refers to Mozilla/systemd[optional]/Xorg/bash/GNU/Linux and does not refer to Google/Facebook/Samsung/Linux

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#35

Post by greatgib »

genewitch wrote: post #24
greatgib wrote: post #19

If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs ( https://furilabs.com/ ). I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with so…

> so your are forced to connect with your Google account Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong. Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separ…

It is not that you have to "interact" with Google the problem, in the sense of interacting like downloading an app. You can use the Aurora store, but once you try to use the app, the app itself will redirect you to an oauth2 login for your Google account, the kind that is associating your "phone"/Google service globally with your Google account. And this despite the fact that I will only use password login for openai and mistral, that should not be linked to Google anyway.

In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.

So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".

That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.

So the problem is the "push" not the "pull".

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#36

Post by lucb1e »

greatgib wrote: post #19

If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs ( https://furilabs.com/ ). I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with so…

Since the shop is super slow and intermittently giving a "Error establishing a database connection", for those having trouble: it's just above 600€ (base 550$ + VAT + shipping). At 17x8cm it's among the largest phones you can get, competing with e.g. the Ulefone 18T Ultra (the one with the FLIR camera, but Android). It has a headphone jack (big plus) but at that size, I just can't use that sadly. This glowing review really made me reconsider whether to see if a "real Linux" phone can work for me given how many years I've been using Linux desktops exclusively now

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#37

Post by immibis »

Uptrenda wrote: post #30

Good luck. Almost every service you need for a smart phone to be "smart" anything requires being part of the Google or Apple botnet. Yeah, you can install whatever crap you like on your phone. Maybe it will do SMS? Kewl. Want maps, mobile banking, 2-factor auth, different password managers, music streaming, and so on... good luck without one of the app stores. Also, being unplugged sometimes means your phone won't ev…

You can do a lot of this on the web.

Hang on, did you just cite 2-factor auth as something that requires a proprietary app? And password managers?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#38

Post by greatgib »

jpnc wrote: post #31
greatgib wrote: post #19

If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs ( https://furilabs.com/ ). I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with so…

>fur iphone Science has gone too far! Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.

Terrible auto complete, thanks for the notification, I was able to correct still.

So furiphone (fxl1) and hopefully nothing related to "iphone".

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#39

Post by INTPenis »

I was daily driving Linux phones 15 years ago! It's crazy to think back on the journey. I have great nostalgia for the Nokia N900 but god damn Maemo/Meego was a piece of shit. When you can't even answer phone calls it's not daily driving anymore, it's beta testing.

After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#40

Post by codethief »

> Many will point out that a Linux phone is less secure than Android or iOS, but that highly depends on your personal threat model. Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won.

Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories.

I find this quote[0] by the developer of SpectrumOS[1] rather telling:

     I have embarked on the ultimate yak shave
     it started with "I wish I could securely store passwords on my computer"
     And now I am at the "I have funding to build my own operating system" level
[0]: https://alyssa.is/about/

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/

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