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Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

thefoggiest.dev

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Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#111

Post by tmtvl »

I have a Volla X22 (or whatever) with Ubuntu Touch. I can send SMS messages, I can call people, and I can listen to music. That's about 80% of what I want a smartphone for taken care of (and the music wouldn't be necessary if there were decent MP3/OGG players which support OPUS, but alas, smartphones killed portable music players).

I did jump through some hoops to install Firefox and get it working with the phone's touchscreen keyboard so I can use digital bus tickets rather than physical ones. I also went and installed Waydroid so I can use WhatsApp for my kung fu club when it's needed.

There are a couple of bike rental companies in Belgium which require one to install an Android/iPhone app to use their services, but I have decided not to give them the time of day.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#112

Post by Tepix »

guappa wrote: post #52
gf000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? One is actually working without draining the battery in an hour and has an actually working security model. Sorry for the tongue in cheek reply, but I am in complete agreement with you.

> actually working security model. ? If you use a famous and popular vendor like Samsung, if you're really really lucky your 0-day will take 9 months to be fixed.

We‘re talking about AOSP Android here

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#113

Post by Tepix »

aragilar wrote: post #28
gf000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? One is actually working without draining the battery in an hour and has an actually working security model. Sorry for the tongue in cheek reply, but I am in complete agreement with you.

I know right, when will Android vendors actually release security patches on time?

GrapheneOS is really good at this.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#115

Post by Tepix »

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…

All the Linux phones that i‘ve used have felt very sluggish, even if they were pretty recent models.

GrapheneOS on the other hand is very snappy.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#116

Post by AAAAaccountAAAA »

margalabargala wrote: post #94
Rooster61 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what I have read has indicated that the Librem 5 is NOT a great daily driver (which was a huge letdown for me). How do you like it?

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.

Ouch. It seems to be even more incomplete than I thought. The lack of Bluetooth and GPS is kind of surprising, since those things have worked on Linux laptops for at least a couple of decades or so.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#117

Post by nextos »

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

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.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#118

Post by tholdem »

dustbunny wrote: post #105
tholdem wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandboxing should be built in and by default, not DIY and glued on, like with apparmor and firejail. "Your car does not come with a seatbelt? Seatbelt parts are easy to order online and assembled on any car, it's your fault for not using one." > Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app? The whole point of sandboxing is that…

Fedora Silverblue is this

It may be in the future, but for now it is no different from Fedora Workstation in terms of security. Please correct me if I am wrong. AFAIK Silverblue has no additional sandboxing or any other improvements to security.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#120

Post by pona-a »

dustbunny wrote: post #105
tholdem wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandboxing should be built in and by default, not DIY and glued on, like with apparmor and firejail. "Your car does not come with a seatbelt? Seatbelt parts are easy to order online and assembled on any car, it's your fault for not using one." > Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app? The whole point of sandboxing is that…

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.
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