I've been waiting for a viable linux phone for years. Ever since the M$ destruction of the Nokia offering.
This one looks pretty good!
It even has a feature that should make it a great migration away from android:
Furilabs Linux Phone
121–130 of 259 posts
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
These do (or did) exist: feature phones shipped with FirefoxOS. Almost no one bought them and the effort was widely seen as a failure, although KaiOS enjoys ongoing success in the developing world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Firefox_OS_devic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
I am using a KaiOS phone, a Nokia 6300 4G. It works well as a 4G WiFi hotspot for a laptop and as a small phone for making calls and sending texts. Have a few apps on it for mapping as well as using the browser occasionally. The KaiOS WhatsApp app will stop working next year though.
Wow. Whatsapp struggles on my iphone 13; how's performance on your Nokia?!
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you guys are running Gnome, you might be interested in helping with (or funding) this native GTK WhatsApp client: https://github.com/tobagin/whakarere/ Since these days something like >90% of people is on WhatsApp, it’s beyond quintessential to have a good WhatsApp client.
My biggest hold-up with that sort of work is that Facebook has previously threatened to ban users who use third-party clients, and then they have gone through with the threat. Is this no longer the case?
Meta also threatened app makers to start a lawsuit. Whatsapp Plus, Whatsup and Mitakuuluu people stopped on that threat. I don't see a reason why Meta would change their stance on this.
There is now a law from the EU, I think it is the DMA, which could change things for people living in the EU regarding interoperability. I haven't read anything about practical follow-ups yet.
By the way, only releasing source code as a blueprint might be fine, that happened before. I might remember it wrong, but it might be lame, the mp3 encoder.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#124It's surprising to me that there aren't any details about the software stack. Whenever I've tried to find a touch-optimized Linux shell, I've come up short. As has been discussed on this forum in the past, most of the attempts are understaffed side projects that have thousands of manhours of work ahead of them. I'd like to know what shell FuriOS is based on, and what they're doing to make it usable. Even a demo video…
I'll write something in the dev blog, thanks. We use Phosh, with some minor patches. Upstream Phosh is pretty good as it is!
I haven't been able to try Phosh because it's badly packaged on NixOS.
Maybe one day I'll take a stab at fixing their package.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#125Can anyone estimate what it would cost to develop a new phone that's like the N900 with updated hardware (slide out keyboard, camera cover, maybe drop the input stylus, a bit flatter and larger) and mainline Linux support for all components? I'm sometimes wondering if this is something I could have Pine64 do if I accidentally get rich enough. I think I would spent the rest of my days just writing the software for thi…
First question is; which SOC would you want to use? Is there any SOC with full mainline support that you would agree to? There is a reason Pine64 and Purism went with SOCs out of the ordinary path.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#126It's surprising to me that there aren't any details about the software stack. Whenever I've tried to find a touch-optimized Linux shell, I've come up short. As has been discussed on this forum in the past, most of the attempts are understaffed side projects that have thousands of manhours of work ahead of them. I'd like to know what shell FuriOS is based on, and what they're doing to make it usable. Even a demo video…
I'll write something in the dev blog, thanks. We use Phosh, with some minor patches. Upstream Phosh is pretty good as it is!
Glad to see you engaging the community!
As someone unfamiliar with Furilabs, it wouldn't occur to me to go looking for a dev blog to see if you've written anything about the shell. I feel like that's information you'd want to link from the marketing page (even if the details are on your blog).
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#127Furi OS was what turned me away. Never heard of it and that makes me realise we don't have an android alternative OS which is permanent. Do we have any OS which is permanent? Shouldn't we have one?
What do you mean by "permanent"?
My specific definition: 20 years later when a retired me boots up the device, it will be able to run the calculator app without shutting down.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am using a KaiOS phone, a Nokia 6300 4G. It works well as a 4G WiFi hotspot for a laptop and as a small phone for making calls and sending texts. Have a few apps on it for mapping as well as using the browser occasionally. The KaiOS WhatsApp app will stop working next year though.
Wow. Whatsapp struggles on my iphone 13; how's performance on your Nokia?!
Works fine to receive text messages and a few pictures.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#129I want to like it... But, I've been bitten too many times by expensive Linux phones (Oh Nokia N900, how I wanted to love you. but you couldn't even make phone calls without threatening to crash). It's a little weird that there are very few details on this thing. Notably, one of my #1 concerns when looking for a new phone today is a good camera. And all I can find on the camera is "it's 50MP!!! " But how do actual, no…
> And all I can find on the camera is "it's 50MP!!! " But how do actual, non-photoshopped pictures look?
It's probably all they know about the camera. Not even Apple make their own cameras. It's always someone else's (customized)product. If they're outsourcing hardware, they might not even know the customer code assigned to the contracted OEM.
> I don't want weird, custom-built stuff that will be forgotten about in 12 months
Then none of hardware and many of software features will work. There are no in-box standard implementations for e.g. phone call in GNU/Linux, so it'll have to be supplied in the form of a custom preconfigured distro with bunch of free preinstalled apps.
The fact that product necessitating free preinstalled apps to function leads to needs to supply OS as flavors of your own weird unsupported distro, like N900-specifix Maemo or Steam Deck OLED-specific SteamOS images.
You aren't going to like being instructed how to install and patch a SIP softphone just to make calls on North American carriers with vague hints for Canadian specifics. It's a phone, it'll be lame if it doesn't make calls out of the box. And there comes the 3 years old $DISTRO-$HWREV-$VERSION.img that instantly shows antenna bars right on the setup screen.
Actually I think it's unfair to call Maemo a weird unsupported thing. It didn't seem that far from bone stock desktop Linux.
Re: Furilabs Linux Phone
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll write something in the dev blog, thanks. We use Phosh, with some minor patches. Upstream Phosh is pretty good as it is!
Glad to see you engaging the community! As someone unfamiliar with Furilabs, it wouldn't occur to me to go looking for a dev blog to see if you've written anything about the shell. I feel like that's information you'd want to link from the marketing page (even if the details are on your blog).
Community is what got me here in the first place. :)
Fair enough! Noted.