But for me, I see so much potential in Linux phones, but after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup, I won't hold my breath.
I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed
But need all that software for phones, make it compatible, stable, easy to install etc. maybe it will happen if some company invests in it. Like gaming on linux and valve
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?
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/
For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc
Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.
There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.
So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?
To answer your question.
But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).
That's when I switched to it full-time on my desktop and never looked back. It's the only success criteria I care about :)
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 linked article states "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." but this also applies to AOSP Android devices with open source apps.
In other words: If you seek a Linux phone, why aren't you picking GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Is there anything else that's missing?
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 Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
> People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
People are free to spent their free time however they want. Some people view building things, whether it’s furniture or software, more enjoyable than playing computer games or watching TV.
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 2. AOSP, while open source, is not developed in any way like a community open source project, so their ability to change anything, especially anything Google does not want to change, is limited and means constant rebasing 3. AOSP doesn't really solve the "run a modern/non-buggy kernel" issue on existing vendor hardware (as far as I know), so if you're going to spend time on getting the kernel to work, you probably want to have a userland that is amenable for getting the kernel working, so AOSP isn't helpful there, and by the time you've done all this, you can probably just run the rest of the standard setup with a distro and tooling you are already familiar with
I think the interesting thing would be if the modern kernel work from (3) could be used by an AOSP build and get the best of both worlds, or if by the time you do all this AOSP is too resource intensive to run on the device, and so running the alternative is the only option.
In fact, it was Nokia's stack that was the youngest one out of all these, as Maemo had no telephony capabilities pre-Android.
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 parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).
Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.
That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
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 download, interruption and reboot. And most importantly, without waiting for a slow vendor to collect and package up all the tiny updates into a big 1GB package that can then be delivered weeks late...
Also, Backups. The only backup solution for a non-rooted phone nowadays is "use our cloud, trust us", and even then backups are always incomplete, because an increasing number of apps set the "no-backup" flags and do (or not do) their own thing, selling you yet one more cloud subscription just to get your own data into "safety". And even with a rooted LineageOS, backups are still a huge pain and incomplete. On the N900, you could just run any old normal Linux backup software, and be done. Imagine, your phone just sending its stuff to your company tape library, no hassle!
And (didn't try this, but should have worked): remote management. SSH into your users' phones to do stuff. Run ansible/puppet/..., manage them like any old Linux box. No tedious mobile device crap management that doesn't really do most of the useful shit, only works on half the hardware and in the end is just yet another cloud lock in by some vendor.
GrapheneOS on the other hand is very snappy.
One is actually working without draining the battery in an hour and has an actually working security model.
Sorry for the tongue in cheek reply, but I am in complete agreement with you.
?
If you use a famous and popular vendor like Samsung, if you're really really lucky your 0-day will take 9 months to be fixed.
The latter is:
- not being developed by Google which chooses what's better for them,
- provides convenient development tools,
- runs any desktop Linux software, can serve as a desktop when connected to a keyboard/screen,
- native terminal, including ssh, sshfs, X forwarding etc,
- allows to choose the OS you run.
More: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
You can even plug a bluetooth keyboard and run Emacs on your Android / AOSP phone nowadays.
On desktop linux I can quickly write up a program to do most anything I want in pretty much any language, and in my text editor of choice. I don't know anything about android development and I don't really want to invest time in learning Google's proprietary GUI toolkit when QT/GTK, or even raw OpenGL is more portable. I once looked into it and gave up when it seemed like it was going to be very painful to write an app outside of android studio (why is there not just a CLI tool to compile these things?). On vanilla linux I can whip up most things in under an hour in C, Rust, or even Bash.
AOSP is still vanilla Linux under the hood, just with a touch interface on top. Plus, ART is open-source and works great for GUI apps.
Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.
Daily Driving a Linux Phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750756 - 2 days ago (3 points, 2 comments)
VoLTE works fine (phosh with gnome-calls)
feel free to ask questions you may have
Do you use Waydroid and Android apps? Apps like Whatsapp and Signal are things I use.
Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.
The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.
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.
Can't speak for the other user who says "degraded in recent stable release"; I use edge and I'm not aware of any issues, and latest stable is as stable as edge is.
Edit: Actually, one "degraded" in the last few months is that GTK dropped support for hardware acceleration on the PP's ancient GPU (2008, GLES 2 only, gtk requires 3 now) so GNOME-related DEs like Phosh use the CPU for rendering now. It's still snappy enough for the way I use it but it might be slow for videos and such.
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 some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...
Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.
Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.
So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".
That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.
So the problem is the "push" not the "pull".
Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
I get that there's still a google profile on your usage of the device, and i'm sure they have a way to link it to your other profile(s).
Science has gone too far!
Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.
So furiphone (fxl1) and hopefully nothing related to "iphone".
But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
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
Just a note of something I came across when looking just now. Don’t mind paying for continued development but worth knowing before you buy.
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.
No videos? Fine, I rarely take videos.
No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it.
No GPS? This one would be a deal-breaker for me.
But depending on the person I can see it being usable.
For most people, it can be difficult to predict future scenarios for Bluetooth that's unrelated to wireless earphones. I always use wired earphones and didn't think I ever needed Bluetooth and always had it disabled. However, I was later forced to use it to configure new devices. E.g.:
- internet router (Eero) from ISP has no buttons or a status display so required Bluetooth on smartphone to configure it
- battery backup power station (Delta Ecoflow) require Bluetooth to configure them
The common theme is for device manufacturers to avoid adding elaborate LCD displays or touchscreen interfaces to the actual device and instead -- offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.
And an app that eventually gets delisted or whatever and your interfaceless device gets turned into a pumpkin...
In fact all things from that chart are there and have been there for years now, including 20h battery life and encrypted SIP calls.
I'm glad I own the phone for the same reason that I regret not holding on to my G1 (the first android phone): Its a neat piece of history. But alas, it will never see use as an actual phone.
The question is whether you're able to live without Android & iOS, perhaps with some limited help from Waydroid. If the answer is yes, as it is for me, then it's a great daily driver.
I use it because it's familiar, hackable and respectful to my attention. It works the way I want it to work and it's capable enough to fulfill all my needs. Switching to Android would be a downgrade on all these aspects. I'm aware that it would be an upgrade in some other aspects that I care about less.
Hang on, did you just cite 2-factor auth as something that requires a proprietary app? And password managers?
After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.
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...
Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories.
I find this quote[0] by the developer of SpectrumOS[1] rather telling:
<qyliss> I have embarked on the ultimate yak shave
<qyliss> it started with "I wish I could securely store passwords on my computer"
<qyliss> And now I am at the "I have funding to build my own operating system" level
Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?
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.
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 ;)
Granted, I'm viewing this as far easier than the sandbox "fake file system" approach? Firefox would be able to see the file exists, most likely, but just not have read rights to it. Yes, you can have some things it can't list, but I would expect that to be low on probability to want to attach to an email?
"Your car does not come with a seatbelt? Seatbelt parts are easy to order online and assembled on any car, it's your fault for not using one."
> Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?
The whole point of sandboxing is that one compromised app can not compromise the whole system and other apps. Compromised dependency on my banking app on Android or iOS only compromises that banking app and nothing else.
I'd wager a bet and say most end-users who end up using Linux are, by one definition or more, developers.
Why wait? You can shove your pip/npm uses into docker/podman and remove 90% of the attack surface today. (Provided you don't map your home directory into the containers)
But I agree it might remove the 90%.
- flatpak
- docker/podman/vm, etc
- /etc/shadow has been around for decades.
- Boot/login with TPM / Yubikey etc around for a decade.
And let's not forget the several noclick attacks that can root your iphone with a message :)
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...
Start a martial art instead :) Things like jewelry, fitness bands and watches aren't generally allowed during training and will only last for a few sessions even if allowed anyway.
That should get you used to not monitoring everything.
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. My friend and I both installed the client to be able to contact him and maintain a friendship.
After a few months, we both lost contact with him simultaneously: something was updated in the client, and it was impossible to re-establish contact with him without a F2F interaction (="privacy"). Sadly, he was also uncontactable by text message. For both of us, the friendship simply ceased to exist.
My reflection is that such things --as with many things in life-- are on a spectrum. At some point on the spectrum, as you head towards the extreme end, your position on that spectrum (be it voluntary or --as with disease-- involuntary) start to impair your ability to live (what might be considered) a normal functional life. I'd also hazard that moving towards that extreme end of the spectrum beings increasing small gains, coupled with increasingly large downsides.
I'm not suggesting that running a pure Linux phone is extreme, but it's definitely in the middle zone where there are definite downsides.
also there are more safe options, like deltachat that don't depend on a phone at all. if we live in the same city we could have regular hangouts where we'd be able to meet without any prior arrangements. or if we know each other well enough you know where i live, or have contact to family members.
this is a matter of priority. i keep using the chinese wechat despite privacy concerns because it is the only way to stay in touch with friends and family in china. i long refused to use it, but as a consequence some friends from that time are now lost.
but outside of china matrix and deltachat are the best options even with android. and matrix unfortunately isn't even that good[1]. it still fails some times, and it is difficult to maintain a server and keep it spam free.
[1] matrix is getting better, but the key handling is complex, and at least one seurity minded friend rejected it in disgust last year when for unknown reasons at one point the encryption between us failed and we could not talk to each other. it's a problem when even tech oriented people privacy minded people reject matrix.
Network effects and human nature combines to make this a completely insurmountable obstacle. You'll likely never convince even a sizable minority of your own friends & family to do tech things the hard way because you think it's more private that way.
That is the argument in favour of being a bit more mainstream - you get to interface with the rest of humanity with much less friction.
I'm still dealing with the fallout from the choices I made in order to conform with that phone. And at the end of the day... I got nothing out of it. Nothing but issues, problems and inconveniences.
The modem eventually stopped working for some reason, and I moved to an iPhone 7 that had been abandoned for quite some time.
It felt like I had let out a breath I had been holding in for years.
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.)
Why would someone make that their first choice? I don't know but they do.
It is long in the planning that software and hardware work together - look into technocracy. Smart anything = spy. Smart meters are tools to monitor resource usage. Smart phones are spying/reporting on you. Ai will guide you.
You will be irritated and fined to death if you do not conform with the plan.
Global warming, terrorists and child porn are the various justifications given to justify whatever-new-loss-of-privacy/resource extraction is required.
Even so, individuals will be fine. You don't have to willingly give up your heart and soul to join the borg. That extra yatch/holiday/holiday home will not appease your true self. How many times do you need to come back?
99% of people should live their lives without a personal threat model.
Currently using a Fairphone with \e\OS. microG is prone to crash on the latest system update but not a big issues. Navigation work just fine too across the USA.
Ordered the FuriPhone and tried to get it in before the Tariff Wars. Currently waiting for it to enter shipping limbo from the manufacturer.
Hoping that the USA Government's treatment of foreign counties helps ignite the push to move away from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Linux and BSD are most likely to benefit in the tech transition. Lower cost to bring up infrastructure and features allow for removing larges USA corporations as daily drivers.
I'm getting tired of all the Enshitification those companies are jumping on to as the new business model.
P.S. We need to stop using the "Gated Community" analogy when speaking of Apple and Google with phones. A real gated community allows owners the addition of more personal security; guards, cameras, and security systems. Apple and Google do not allow owners to improve security; firewall, direct backups, and removal of useless applications. The closet analogy I can come up with is "Prison Community".
I did jump through some hoops to install Firefox and get it working with the phone's touchscreen keyboard so I can use digital bus tickets rather than physical ones. I also went and installed Waydroid so I can use WhatsApp for my kung fu club when it's needed.
There are a couple of bike rental companies in Belgium which require one to install an Android/iPhone app to use their services, but I have decided not to give them the time of day.
Still works.
Still like it.
If the author especially liked the camera of that phone, it was probably because of the custom app that interfaced to the sensor.
Getting good photography on a linux phone has been one of the enduring problems. Akin to overcoming custom graphics drivers for early linux SoC development.
Like the other (currently top ranked) comment, I highly recommend the furiphone as the current peak of linux phone development.
Animats•14h ago
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
codethief•14h ago
Nux•14h ago
Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services. Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
amaccuish•14h ago
Without that ability, anyone can plug in to your phone and write whatever they want to the internal flash and your phone will be none the wiser.
lucb1e•13h ago
...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
Klonoar•5h ago
JCattheATM•2h ago
amelius•13h ago
Or maybe it is because mobile computing is just stuck, and it won't move even in decades ...
Nux•10h ago
All in all I must have installed 3rd party roms on 6-7 devices with good results.
lawn•14h ago
blackbear_•2h ago
Totally, get a Pixel phone and put GrapheneOS on it. You get state of the art hardware and the latest Android hardened for privacy and with optional Google services. That is, you can install and remove them anytime like any other app.
Animats•2h ago
wishfish•2h ago
At the heart of this is Netguard. I'm using this firewall as a whitelist. Blocking network for everything except for the things I approve. So far, this seems to be working well.
It's been a great experience. Have ended up using this device more than my iPhone. Still has the stock ROM but, with the bad stuff disabled, it hasn't gotten in my way. This feels like it's truly my own device in a way that's rare these days. Main drawback is the lack of future updates.