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Furilabs Linux Phone

furilabs.com

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Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#31

Post by GranPC »

anoncow wrote: post #23

Furi 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?

FuriOS is a derivate of Droidian, which in turn is basically Debian with Halium support. So it's pretty much Debian + some custom patches for usability, hardware support, performance, so on. We intend to upstream as many of our changes as possible as time permits, but right now we are laser focused on improving the experience day in and day out.

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#34

Post by GranPC »

rendaw wrote: post #28

It says "Wired/Wireless and NFC combo" under battery charging, but there's no mention of NFC under "Connectivity". Is it charging only? I'd like a linux phone but the Purism phone eschewed NFC too.

There's NFC, although the Linux stack support for NFC is a little limiting. However the NFC hardware is passed through to the Android container, so if, for example, your bank doesn't demand that you pass SafetyNet, you can pay with the phone. (I have done this)

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#35

Post by neilv »

$500 price point is a lot for an open source enthusiast phone, especially one unknown.

The Pine64 PinePhone is $150-$200, with similar hardware provenance, but various open source projects that might at least give better software longevity and software trustworthiness. https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/

An additional consideration: as much as we like and respect our global colleagues, unfortunately I could see both hardware brands getting banned in some locales and by some organizations, like some other telecom brands have been banned. A phone that can't be used as a phone has little value, no matter how open it is.

For somewhat different provenance, the Purism Librem 5 is coming in at $800+, which is too high a high price point for most open source enthusiast contributors. https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

And Purism's made-in-USA version, the Liberty Phone, is at $2K+. I guess maybe government or enterprise sales? https://shop.puri.sm/shop/liberty-phone/

I'm thinking that better for the Western open source developers and non-wealthy enthusiasts would be something more palatable to Western governments, and usable as a daily driver, like Librem 5, but priced somewhere in (guessing) $200-$400.

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#36

Post by GranPC »

zamalek wrote: post #33

Very tempting. What is the deal with play store integrity, i.e. is wallet (and some banking apps) supported?

Afraid not. These things usually require hardware attestation to ensure you're running the exact software Google wants you to run. Now, if someone figured out a way to bypass it, that would probably work for a bit. But it's a cat and mouse game.

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#37

Post by lvass »

pmontra wrote: post #8

> Phone: 171mm x 82mm x 12mm : 280g 280 grams is a lot even for today's phones. 12 mm is half a inch. Very thick. The other dimensions are 6.7 x 3.2 inches. Ok, this might be a phone for people that want to prove a point but it's too cumbersome. How about starting with something reasonable and fit it with only what fits within those bounds? An example: 160 x 80 x 9 and 200 g. That would be a big phone but not bigger…

Is there prior art that includes a removable battery, headphone jack and IP68 at those "reasonable" bounds? I wonder how large the battery could be in that case.

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#38

Post by throawayonthe »

jchw wrote: post #13

Apparently it is based on Halium, so it's probably not going to run mainline Linux any time soon. On the other hand, I'm less happy with Android than I pretty much ever have been, so having some more options outside of relatively unusable Linux phones and being stuck with modified Android firmware certainly does not hurt. I am definitely interested, especially if the team working on it is as active as it seems they a…

I want to get one of these to play around with soon: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6T_(oneplus-fajit...

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#39

Post by freedomben »

zamalek wrote: post #33

Very tempting. What is the deal with play store integrity, i.e. is wallet (and some banking apps) supported?

It says "F-Droid, Aurora Store, and other sources'" so I'm guessing there's no Play store and probably no GMS and other increasingly mandatory proprietary dependencies. Open source Android is in rough shape as a result of Google's tightening the ratchet.

Edit: In a different comment one of the devs clarified that it does have microG, so quite a few apps will actually work.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840021

Re: Furilabs Linux Phone

#40

Post by mmh0000 »

I 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, non-photoshopped pictures look? Does it do okay in low-light? Does it support any sort of optical zoom?

Their website is currently as slow as a frozen snail (which, if they can't run a basic web server, leads to a lot of doubt they can maintain a long-term Linux distro). So I couldn't click around much, but I didn't find anything really informative.

I tried looking at YouTube videos and only found some weird official videos of a person's hand putting the phone in a sink. Like... Yes, it has been expected for the last 8ish years that my phone will be waterproof, that's not an amazing achievement.

It also seems to be "weird" Linux, like Maemo was for the N900. I don't want weird, custom-built stuff that will be forgotten about in 12 months. Just give me a standard Debain/Fedora/Whatever and an unlocked bootloader to reinstall with what I want.

IMHO they should really look at what Valve did with the steamdeck and SteamOS, It's a custom Linux that works well, but, it's also standard hardware with an open bootloader. There are dozens of SteamOS alternatives.

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