Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

thefoggiest.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 237 posts

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#81

Post by Rooster61 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #72
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…

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.

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?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#82

Post by adornKey »

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 now use PostmarketOS as a daily driver on the old standard Pinephone, and it looks good to me. After trying a few recent distributions PostmarketOS seemed to work best.

Before PostmarketOS I used Arch on a Pinephone Pro for 2 years, but I think it finally updated itself into oblivion... The software never reached a really stable state, but I was surprised, that it worked so long.

In the beginning of the PinePhone I think Mobian worked best, but the most recent version didn't look as good as PostmarketOS to me.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#83

Post by saidinesh5 »

Jhsto wrote: post #57

I have been thinking daily driving Linux phone just to manage smartphone addiction. My first step was to get rid of my MacBook. Now, a year later, I think I'm ready to get rid of the Apple Watch. With the watch, it has been surprising how much you think you need to record your HR and workouts -- but it's just another bogus number that you don't need. Later the year I think I'll be finally ready for the phone. This wo…

Smartphone addiction usually just means using one or more of the social media apps... (Twitter, YouTube, instagram, reddit etc...)

All of them work just fine on the mobile browser on these Linux OSes...

What you'll get stuck with is the lack of useful smartphone apps like bank apps, payment apps, navigation apps etc...

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#84

Post by 0_____0 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #72
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…

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.

I have been using an Altair 8800 as my daily driver for about 50 years now. It's really not a big deal to enter instructions through the switch panel, especially with good gloves, and it does basically everything I want it to.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#85

Post by Y_Y »

Because Android and iOS serve other masters.

Its's not just that this is morally unsound, it's fucking infuriating. Imagine JD Rockefeller had arranged it so that your pen and paper constantly nagged you and tried to trick you into buying things.

I'm calling it now, society is going to collapse and it's going to be because of software and hardware working together in tandem to make life miserable and expensive and only accessible through authorized devices and apps for the best possible experience.

(I do have a PinePhone Pro, and it has its own problems, but they're merely inconvenient rather than life-draining.)

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#86

Post by mac-attack »

mft_ wrote: post #60

But why, indeed. Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol.…

I had a similar experience with GrapheneOS. There is a balance in act between continuing down the privacy rabbit hole versus being able to communicate effectively with your social circle and it is easy to double down on privacy at the cost of relationships if you are not aware of how it is affecting others.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#87

Post by jonesjohnson »

INTPenis wrote: post #39

I was daily driving Linux phones 15 years ago! It's crazy to think back on the journey. I have great nostalgia for the Nokia N900 but god damn Maemo/Meego was a piece of shit. When you can't even answer phone calls it's not daily driving anymore, it's beta testing. After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. My experience with the N900 (and the N9 later) was pretty decent. The N900 was way ahead of its time. I got it in 2010. popped in a 32G µSD-card and I had 64GB, which was already a lot. The UI was amazing. True multitasking on a phone. IIRC the iPhone at that time wasn't able to do that. usable HW keyboard, headphone jack, two cameras, proper two-stage camera button, a little stand to prop it op, replaceable battery, IR emitter (there was a tv-b-gone app!), FM Transmitter to hear audio in any car...

It was a (small) brick and the resistive touch display + stylus was not perfect, but okay.

The software ecosystem was not good, though. Userbase was small. And when Nokia finally dropped it, it remained the first and last of its kind, so noone was keen on keeping developing for it.

Meego was getting better, and Sailfish is actually really ok.

I'm "temporarily" (4 years now...) using Android ("/e/os" - what a stupid name), but since I do not want to use any Google Services, I feel that it's always just whack-a-mole to get the app you want running on the device and have it properly working...

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#89

Post by jonesjohnson »

MelodyUwU wrote: post #74

same here, i daily drive linux on my phone, ditched the prioprietary OSs long ago

How are you dealing with companies that force you to use an Android app? There are so many services in daily life where people just expect me to have an Android/iPhone device. Those things are increasingly difficult to achieve in a different way.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#90

Post by hnpolicestate »

Y_Y wrote: post #85

Because Android and iOS serve other masters. Its's not just that this is morally unsound, it's fucking infuriating. Imagine JD Rockefeller had arranged it so that your pen and paper constantly nagged you and tried to trick you into buying things. I'm calling it now, society is going to collapse and it's going to be because of software and hardware working together in tandem to make life miserable and expensive and on…

Digital fascism is the future. The majority don't care. A friend wanted to stream a clip from YouTube with me on discord and actually chose the completely DMR ridden YouTube Discord app instead of just streaming directly from YouTube.

Why would someone make that their first choice? I don't know but they do.

Post reply on HN