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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?

#61

Post by aragilar »

guappa wrote: post #49
codethief wrote: post #40

> 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…

Firejail and apparmor have existed for years. If you don't use them maybe it's your fault? Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?

Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#62

Post by mpol »

Piraty wrote: post #29
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 do use a Pinephone (not pro) for 5y now. I switched to the "stable" branch of pmos 2y ago which made my life siginicantly more hassle free. Note that pmos support for pinephone (not pro) degraded in recent stable release, so i recommend to not run 24.12 but the prior version. you will still get occasional updates from the stable alpine branch it's based on (which makes 99% of available packages anyway). VoLTE works…

Thank you.

Do you use Waydroid and Android apps? Apps like Whatsapp and Signal are things I use.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#63

Post by mrheosuper »

immibis wrote: post #34
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

And who decided that ?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#64

Post by d3Xt3r »

staunton wrote: post #44
d3Xt3r wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup Linux desktops are very much usable now, especially if you choose a competent DE like KDE, and a decent distro (ie, not Ubuntu). Is there anything particular you find the Linux desktop still lacks majorly, preventing you from switching?

What's wrong with Ubuntu?

Canonical keeps doing stupid, anti-user, anti-community stuff constantly, to the point that many people consider them to be the Microsoft of the Linux world.

For instance, not long ago, they were including ads/Amazon results in the Apps menu[1], similar to what Microsoft did with the Start menu. They also keep sneaking in suggestions (aka ads) for their Ubuntu Pro subscription in various places like the MOTD, or when you run apt[2], which isn't cool.

Most recently, the biggest annoyance is with the way they've been aggressively pushing their Snap store, to the point of even hijacking regular "apt install" commands - normally, you'd expect an "apt install" to fetch a regular .deb from the distro's repos, but they silently hijack the command to fetch apps from their Snap store instead[3]. Now, you may think that normal, non-technical users don't need to care about Snaps - and you'd be right, if they actually worked well. Snaps are slow and buggy and have been a constant source of pain for many users[4].

A major issue is with how buggy Ubuntu has become, especially OS upgrades, which may result in anything from minor issues like broken shortcuts, to complete breakage[5]. This might lead you to think that it's better to do a fresh install, but of late, new ISO releases have been incredibly buggy - like the 24.04 LTS installer, which kept crashing for many users[6] - and considering that LTS is supposed to be the super-stable version, that is not a good user experience.

Finally, my pet peeve is with how commercial Canonical have become, like with pushing their Pro subscriptions to targeting enterprises over end users. A couple of months ago, someone was complaining about how confusing the website had become, where the first "download" button you saw wasn't for the Ubuntu ISO, but some enterprise crap. Everything on the website just screamed "corporate"[7].

It feels like Canonical has long shed it's newbie-friendly image and turned into a soulless corporation, not unlike Microsoft.

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explai...

[2] https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLDQA2f1GM4

[4] https://rl.bloat.cat/r/linux4noobs/comments/1cgw11u/snaps_ar...

[5] https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1__qfYXtv0

[7] https://bsky.app/profile/mary.my.id/post/3lghc4rjqg2vd

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#65

Post by xorcist »

aragilar wrote: post #61
guappa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firejail and apparmor have existed for years. If you don't use them maybe it's your fault? Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?

Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).

Server software is usually compartmentalized in uid:s but desktop software seldom is, if ever. Package managers and maintainers could do a lot here to make it easier. Some things long time Linux users like to do, like running Firefox as a separate user, is still a much more involved process than it should be.

A lot of it is probably standards and culture work, like where a user can expect to store files and have them readable by Firefox in this example. So perhaps this is something the GNOME/Freedesktop people could have been interested in and made a difference? Instead we have things like Flatpak, which is good but not the lowest hanging fruit here.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#66

Post by aragilar »

xorcist wrote: post #65
aragilar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).

Server software is usually compartmentalized in uid:s but desktop software seldom is, if ever. Package managers and maintainers could do a lot here to make it easier. Some things long time Linux users like to do, like running Firefox as a separate user, is still a much more involved process than it should be. A lot of it is probably standards and culture work, like where a user can expect to store files and have them…

For user-facing stuff, I agree it's hard because of the challenge of managing access to data (and I would argue no system does this well, Android has a different set of failure modes, and I've not used QubesOS but presumably it has it's own issues as well), but in the top-level comment, the concern was around using pip/npm, which to me is almost a solved problem if you care enough and are willing to put the effort (and money) in.

It's also not like Linux is any different with respect to installing random PyPI/npm packages on any other desktop/laptop OS (https://xkcd.com/1200/), so I'm not sure anything desktop Linux does here would change the fact that installing random software from the internet may be a bad idea sometimes ;)

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#67

Post by guappa »

xorcist wrote: post #65
aragilar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or go old-school with multiple users and chroots? You could even install from (and host) a trusted repository, where the source and binaries are vetted (and you can pay people to do this for you).

Server software is usually compartmentalized in uid:s but desktop software seldom is, if ever. Package managers and maintainers could do a lot here to make it easier. Some things long time Linux users like to do, like running Firefox as a separate user, is still a much more involved process than it should be. A lot of it is probably standards and culture work, like where a user can expect to store files and have them…

You're going to deal with the users who can't attach a file to an email because the firefox process has no access to it?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#68

Post by d3Xt3r »

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

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#69

Post by seba_dos1 »

holowoodman wrote: post #32
carpenecopinum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

I switched from Nokia N900 to Librem 5 that I'm writing this from and I'm still enjoying these things. I miss the keyboard though.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#70

Post by seba_dos1 »

aragilar wrote: post #41
quotemstr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still makes zero sense to take the XDG/dbus/whatever stack and make it run on a phone, suboptimally, when AOSP is right there and has already solved all the thousands of integration issues you'll run into --- plus, it's already free software. NIH is the only rationale for the "Linux" phone thing and it's why it will be forever fringe. People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play…

One could ask why AOSP was created when there was an existing userland on linux that could be used (and was, by Nokia). More seriously, I think the reason people want to do this is threefold: 1. Android vendors almost universally seem to make it hard to run stock AOSP (and do the Windows bloatware thing that Windows vendors were known for), so a "linux phone" lets people run what they want and remove what they do not…

Not just Nokia - at least Trolltech and Motorola had their own stacks, and Openmoko predates Android release too.

In fact, it was Nokia's stack that was the youngest one out of all these, as Maemo had no telephony capabilities pre-Android.

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