2024 year of the Linux D̶e̶s̶k̶t̶o̶p̶ phone
Nothing would make me more happy. I really wish it weren’t such a pain to deal with the telephony. You check devices on postmarketOS & while some devices can boot, it’s usually the actual phone part that isn’t working–which is kind of an important part. The open hardware phones work fine, but their specs are ancient while being as expensive as flagships. I still have eventual hope tho as device needs have started to plateau.
I believe (and this just a believe) that one Linux-first phone with actually working hardware could tip the nonstopping swing. Not for “average” user anytime in maybe even next decade, but there are a lot of people bored with current smartphones, tinkers or just wanting more privacy above than unverificable and unproven promises from Apple and Google.
Unfortunately given the stalemate of the mobile duopoly & service providers like banks thinking attestation is okay & what you run on your hardware is their business, Linux phones will have a hell of an uphill battle to take on. Wild to me is hearing the average Joe is happy their phones now don’t let them do whatever they want & they like the attestation since they don’t trust themselves with operating the device. These are the masses that will obviously be catered to, but maybe eventually be the only ones supported as banking websites age with little maintenance & receive no feature parity.
i have an idol3 from 2016 and even that has all the phone capabilities (except the camera) and it’s not listed as a community grade. you would be surprised at how many phones are working fully. and with sxmo/swmo every phone ever has a chance to be a daily driver.
i remember a time when the thing blocking linux migration was audio calling on msn messenger. it got solved but nobody cared. these things take time to go over the tipping point. hardly anybody used android when it first came out, symbian was all the hype.
if you are willing and have a spare phone you should try postmarketos now.
Imagine a full Linux desktop experience while plugged into a monitor and then a mobile experience on the go. That’s the dream.
10 years ago was the time to start, too.
Imagine a Linux-like OS for mobile as a reasonable 3rd mobile operating system. People would run it and seem weird like when people run Linux on their laptop nowadays. 1-2% market share. Basically nothing is native to it but a handful of open source apps, but waydroid would be more complete. That would be beautiful.
Shoot. Imagine a reasonably new phone running something Linux with a shell laptop that lets you properly converge. Linux has the best ARM support because basically anything can be complied.
That’s what Samsung tried with Dex. You could even run an honest to god (emulated) Linux on it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out and no one knows about it today.
Samsung offered this for a short while with Linux on Dex. You could easily run a lightweight Ubuntu Desktop container when plugged in. Sadly they removed it after a few months.
You can get this with a Pinephone and a USB-C dock. Both experiences leave a lot to be desired, but it’s there.
As someone who owns a PinePhone I can tell you that a lot more work needs to be done first. postmarketOS is ok but being Alpine based means you have to forever deal with all the issues that come with it including its primitive package manager. And mobian also kept breaking ever other half a year or so requiring manual config changes etc.
What we need IMO, is a more reliable spin like Fedora, maybe even something immutable like Silverblue to ensure the stability required for a daily driver device while also being quick to deploy the latest versions of releases.
There’s also the whole app ecosystem aspect but between advances in Waydroid and convergent GTK apps, I’m more concerned about the underlying base OS than the app ecosystem ^^
I would love to be able to use a Linux mobile as my primary but I know that’s not going to happen, unfortunately.
Until it can run my banking app it’s unfortunately not a contender, no matter how much I want it
Is there any specific use case for the app that you don’t get with the mobile website?
I’ve figured out that my bank’s app is basically a wrapper for the mobile website, the only thing they added being fingerprint login.
Instantly deleted the app and use the website now, one less thing that can potentially spy on me.
what do you even mean “don’t support encryption”? Do you mean FDE? In that case PostmarketOS supports it, and you can get any other distro to use FDE if you tinker hard enough
I believe PostmarketOS with the PinePhone Pro is a decent experience. Nope, it’s not. Don’t get it if you don’t want to contributr your time to the project. With that said, I’m not too confident on its usability, 2 years after its release. What do you run and what has your experience been like?
I am using the PinePhonePro as my primary phone for over a year now. There are of course some challanges but it is definitly possible
I’m getting “Android Gingerbread on an HTC EVO” vibes, which is not a bad thing. It stands out, in a good way.
Love the look of this, would love to be able to use this on my current phone
