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Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

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Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#131

Post by Arnavion »

pona-a wrote: post #120
dustbunny wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora Silverblue is this

How so? I'm writing this from an Fedora Sericea, which is Silverblue but with Sway instead of GNOME. Atomic Fedoras solve only package hysteresis (your package manager being unable to reproduce the intended system state because of unaccounted for changes) by generating the root file system with OSTree. It has nothing to do with sandboxing the applications themselves.

It does in the sense that all the applications you install will be via flatpak, so they get sandboxed that way. Of course it depends on how locked down the sandbox is configured for each of those applications.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#132

Post by 418tpot »

rahen wrote: post #104
fsflover wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? The latter is: - not being developed by Google which chooses what's better for them, - provides convenient development tools, - runs any desktop Linux software, can serve as a desktop when connected to a keyboard/screen, - native terminal, including ssh, sshfs, X forwarding etc, - allows to choose the OS you run. More: https://source.puri.sm/Lib…

Those are very relevant for a Linux laptop, but much less so for a Linux smartphone. An AOSP-based distro like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or /e/OS paired with Termux provides almost a all of this, with the added benefit of ART - quite possibly the most polished runtime in the Linux ecosystem. You can even plug a bluetooth keyboard and run Emacs on your Android / AOSP phone nowadays.

I currently run LineageOS and am constantly frustrated with its limitations every day.

On desktop linux I can quickly write up a program to do most anything I want in pretty much any language, and in my text editor of choice. I don't know anything about android development and I don't really want to invest time in learning Google's proprietary GUI toolkit when QT/GTK, or even raw OpenGL is more portable. I once looked into it and gave up when it seemed like it was going to be very painful to write an app outside of android studio (why is there not just a CLI tool to compile these things?). On vanilla linux I can whip up most things in under an hour in C, Rust, or even Bash.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#133

Post by npodbielski »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #68
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…

For completeness sake, here are a couple of other decent alternatives to the FuriPhone: 1. The Volla Phone Quintus, with Ubuntu Touch: https://volla.online/de/shop/volla-phone-quintus/ 2. Jolla C2 (or any other supported Xperia device), with SailfishOS: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/Jolla-community-phone

300 euros does not seem much. Worth a try.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#134

Post by Arnavion »

mpol wrote: post #9

Anyone using PostmarketOS on a phone? And I mean as a daily driver, with no other phone. I have been following it for years and would like to switch someday, but that moment hasn't happened yet. Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.

I maintain the PinePhone for pmOS. It's my only phone and I've been using it without major problems (not including temporary regressions) since 2021. I use it for calls, SMS, camera, firefox and a couple of Android applications in Waydroid (Element X, Doordash).

Can't speak for the other user who says "degraded in recent stable release"; I use edge and I'm not aware of any issues, and latest stable is as stable as edge is.

Edit: Actually, one "degraded" in the last few months is that GTK dropped support for hardware acceleration on the PP's ancient GPU (2008, GLES 2 only, gtk requires 3 now) so GNOME-related DEs like Phosh use the CPU for rendering now. It's still snappy enough for the way I use it but it might be slow for videos and such.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#135

Post by rixed »

kernal wrote: post #123
seba_dos1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an Android device with an old unsupported kernel that runs a hacked up Debian-ish userspace on top of Android layer. While that may be good enough for some, it's not what some of us want. I'll stay with my Librem 5, which is also totally usable, runs actual Debian, runs Waydroid too, and does not bring me Halium pain.

The lengths people go to for a horrible Ui/UX and app experience is bewildering. I guess they justify it by not caving into Google or Apple. Of course, all of their privacy concerns and safeguards go away when the credit cards, utilities and services they use all circumvent their precious Linux phone. But hey, at least you’re running Linux on your phone, right?

It is unclear to me what alternative you are proposing, apart from bending to Google and Apple?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#136

Post by m4rtink »

nextos wrote: post #117
d3Xt3r wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For completeness sake, here are a couple of other decent alternatives to the FuriPhone: 1. The Volla Phone Quintus, with Ubuntu Touch: https://volla.online/de/shop/volla-phone-quintus/ 2. Jolla C2 (or any other supported Xperia device), with SailfishOS: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/Jolla-community-phone

Jolla is really good. SFOS can even run lots of Android apps on an emulator, including banking apps, with zero issues. And the native ones are a delight to use, great indie apps. I wish they got funding from EU and became a completely open source alternative to the duopoly.

Have been running Sailfish OS on my primary phone since 2013 - works fine. Avoids a lot of the Android pitfalls, like being abble to easily SSH in and upload/backup data or total absence of advertizing anywhere. :)

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#137

Post by amlib »

jasode wrote: post #126
margalabargala wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at what's missing from their roadmap here: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ No videos? Fine, I rarely take videos. No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it. No GPS? This one would be a deal-breaker for me. But depending on the person I can see it being usable.

>No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it. For most people, it can be difficult to predict future scenarios for Bluetooth that's unrelated to wireless earphones. I always use wired earphones and didn't think I ever needed Bluetooth and always had it disabled. However, I was later forced to use it to configure new devices. E.g.: - internet router (Eero) from ISP has no…

> offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.

And an app that eventually gets delisted or whatever and your interfaceless device gets turned into a pumpkin...

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#138

Post by Arnavion »

immibis wrote: post #37
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?

I actually run Waydroid on my Linux phone because of 2FA. All my personal 2FAs are just TOTPs in a keepassxc DB synced between my phone and my PCs (accessed via gnome-secrets on the phone). But my $dayjob requires MS Authenticator in the "here's a 2-digit number, open MS Authenticator on your phone and type them in to approve" mode, so I have to run that in waydroid.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#139

Post by Arnavion »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #98
Distilitron wrote: post #47

And yes this nonencrypted shit is totally insecure

What makes you think it's not encrypted? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Full_disk_encryption seems to indicate that support varies a bit by device but it's perfectly doable.

Note that the initramfs is stored without encryption or signing. So while your data won't be leaked when your phone gets stolen, it should be considered compromised if you get it back.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#140

Post by JCattheATM »

amaccuish wrote: post #15
Nux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do this routinely. Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services. Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

It should be said though that only Pixel, Fairphone, and maybe some Motorolas support relocking the bootloader with a custom OS. Without that ability, anyone can plug in to your phone and write whatever they want to the internal flash and your phone will be none the wiser.

The OnePlus6T supports it, it will still display a warning but it will be locked.
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