Is anyone here using a (non-Android) linux Smartphone? Curious what type of phones y’all are using and what your experience has been.
I was using the nokia N900 since it was first released and then I’d buy new or used ones every couple years when it broke. Apparently some factory in China made a bunch of extras. That lasted about a decade.
Then when the librem5 was first announced I sent them some money. Funny enough that after that Pine64 both announced and finished developing their pinephone before the librem5 got released. So I got one of those and then one of the pinephone pros.
Eventually the librem5 came out and I’ve been using that since then. The functionality of the switches makes all the difference for me. That, and the extra thickness makes it more portable and easier to use and handle than the pinephones.
Nothing has come close to competing with the N900. That has been the best cell phone I have ever had by a lot… since I got my first winmobile phone back in 2002. It was the perfect size and the keyboard was extremely functional. The stylus was super handy as well, although you typically never needed it, but it did make using more desktop type software on a small touch screen a lot more handy.
The impression that I get from modern linux smartphone developers is that almost none of them have any experience outside of the limited design model of iphone and android phones. So even if they are aware of the N900 and what they are, they don’t have an understanding of what has been lost when Steve Jobs insisted that not having a keyboard was a “good thing” just because they wanted to cut manufacturing costs. Remember, this is the guy that use to insist that mice should only have 1 button. I’m an artist, I like aesthetics too, but functionality comes first when you are developing tools.
To summarize the strengths of the N900 outside of running linux: the small overall pocket friendly size, the fold out keyboard was easy to use when needed and out of the way when not needed. The stylus wasn’t needed for software designed for the mobile platform, but it made all the difference when using software not made for the mobile platform. That and the hardware keyboard. When you got all that functionality built in, you don’t have to fake it on an overly large screen that barely fits in your pocket. And that screen does a crap job of it.
Sorry about the rant. I’ve developed strong opinions on this topic over the last couple decades.
As for my current use… mostly I’ve moved away from using a smartphone as much. Its not healthy and isn’t an efficient tool for doing computer stuff. And as I mentioned, they aren’t that portable since they’re so damn big now. They make them thin now, but that just makes them harder to use/hold and doesn’t increase the room in your pocket any. I now find doing phone calls with a voip setup to be easier. I got everything routed through my email inbox and find that to be easiest.
Most people aren’t going to agree with me on this. Most people first learned the iphone/droid model and they base their opinions on that.
Sony Xperia III with Sailfish OS flashed on it. Running Android emulation for a few apps like local public transport, K9 Mail. No Google.
Nice thing its easily programmable in Python / Guile / Rust. Plus has a FLOSS Linux app store.
I also have a Gemini PDA with a physical keyboard, which runs Sailfish as well. It’s nice to use vim on it.
Is sailfish OS a better experience than postmarketOS in general?
I have not compared them. It works fine.
A bit late to the party here, but today I flashed Ubuntu Touch onto a Xiaomi Poco X3, and it’s… well, it’s rough.
All the base functionality seems to be there, calls should work (not sure because I didn’t test them extensively), sms works, location/gps works, nfc is supported, camera is… passable, battery life is certainly, and noticeably worse but that’s a given - when on standby, the battery goes down roughly 8% every 5 hours, so approx. 27% per day on standby.
While I’m really glad to see how much Linux phone development sped up, they are still nowhere near daily driver status - even the phones built with Linux support in mind are not faring well from what I’ve seen. Even then, I’m keeping this Poco X3 because Android’s days seem to be numbered.
I daily drive a Librem 5. First thing to note is do not expect a well polished experience. Battery life is bad, only about 4 hours of light use, and 8 or so hours if left in suspend. It can do VoLTE, send SMS, use web apps and any apps coded with libadwaita or kirigami. Other desktop apps can be forced to scale on the display, but it won’t be perfect.
I use Signal desktop as my main means of communication on the Librem 5. I have a spare normie phone for setup, but Waydroid is an option. I do use Waydroid for a few apps that have no web browser equivalent.
Idk, all I can say is, you have to really want it to live with it. I don’t do gaming or heavy social media use or anything removed that, so it is just fine for me. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
Is that battery life in airplane mode or not? Curious how long you get in airplane mode.
You could probably stretch it to 10-12 hours if you turn all the hardware kill switches to off, which activates “lockdown mode.” It turns off every sensor on the device.
I wish Ununtu Touch switched name, since its neither Ubuntu nor Canonical any longer.
Hang in you mean Ubuntu touch right? There’s no such thing as Ubuntu touch?
I wish… and I did try. You can see my post history but basically PinePhone and PinePhone Pro sitting neatly on the shelf.
They work. Sure, but between battery life or rather power management, lack of camera on the Pro, lack of MIPS on the base model to use Android apps via Waydroid, I had a lot of fun tinkering, but for me these are not daily drives.
For now I’m stuck with deGoogle Android thanks to /e/OS pre-installed by Murena on a CMF Nothing 1. It’s neat thanks to F-Droid, Termux, KDE Connect, GadgetBridge, etc but overall I’d much rather be on Linux proper. If there is a path please do share.
I went from Sailfish, to Ubuntu phone, back to Sailfish,
then bought a Pinephone due to the war,
not knowing if the Finnish company would survive
before going back to Sailfish.Pinephone, despite it being the most linux of phones, used up too much battery power.
Ubuntu phones were already miles better.Ubuntu phones were already miles better
Unfortunately none of them shipped with a modem that worked on american networks. ;[
I would have loved to have given one of those a chance.
I daily drive Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 5. It’s not without quirks, but I like the experience. Many practical and nice native apps, Android app support through Waydroid, banking and things that would require Google Play verification I solve through the browser. Fairly good battery life, VoLTE is solved for the FP5 and some other models (which has been an issue with many Linux phones) and the community is very active solving issues and helping each other day and night.
Warning: the devs of waydroid said it should never be trusted for sensitive use, due to security issues
oneplus 6T and poco F1 on mobian and postmarketOS. SDM845 devices with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, about the peak of performance you can have nowadays for about $50 apiece. I’d encourage anyone to get a cheap device, fun to play around with and prepare for the day when it becomes viable. ubuntu touch is also possible, but since it’s halium (like android + linux VM) it wants me to downgrade to Android 9 which is virtually impossible for me; the former two run full linux kernels and don’t have that limitation - spotty hardware support, though.
performance is acceptable, the power to do almost anything you want, access whatever and whenever you want. I run it without broadband, just wifi. the cameras are unusable. since I keep the modem off, GPS doesn’t work either. so it’s a linux laptop with touch, basically. the apps are a shitshow, rarely will you find one that supports touch and adapts to the vertical zoomed-in screen.
but it’s getting better, shit’s way better now than it was only a year ago and eventually it’ll get there.
as long as you’re aware it’s not an android alternative, you’ll have a good time.
Looking forward to oniro OS
FYI there’s !linuxphones@lemmy.ml and !linuxphones@lemmy.ca if you’re looking for more enthusiasts
If you are, you’re usually limited to progressive web apps. Not a bad thing, just something to be aware of. That’s the reason I had to give up when I tried. Not having a decent navigation software was really hard.
For me it was battery life. The thing wouldn’t sleep properly.
Sleeps good enough for the music stream to be choppy, but not good enough to last a day.
I just ordered a pinephone, haven’t received it yet. The pinephone is the best native option in the U.S right now but you can get some unlocked smartphones with better hardware and install Linux it’s just a bit of a headache.
The general consensus is that it’s pretty low power, being one of the only chipsets that has publicly available design docs for it. It’s a mid tier 2015 era chipset. It a bit slow but works as a phone. You can probably emulate android apps in it.
hows the camera?
I haven’t received it yet but apparently not good. It’s a $200 phone. I mostly want it because it runs Linux natively, has a regular unlocked bootloader that isn’t designed to be frustrating like android phones, and can send display over USB-C so it’s like a regular computer. You can run anything like emulating windows apps, you could install steam on it technically by putting it in an emulation container, but the chipset is very old at this point, and so you aren’t going to be emulating anything remotely modern on it. It is just a PC in your pocket though. You have a package manager, you can install many different Linux distros on it. You can get a LoRa radio mesh case for it, a physical keyboard/battery case, which I will probably get eventually. I think it’s worth the 200 dollars. I really want to get away from android. It’s hard because everything from Arm CPUs to the modems are completely proprietary. The only reason this device exists is because the design docs got leaked.
It does have phone, sms, and your standard phone stuff. You can get several different desktop environments like plasma mobile or gnome mobile and several others. It has 3 GBs of ram, and the OS usually takes up around 500 MB. It has dip switches to disable the hardware like the camera, cell modem, wifi, bt, etc. It would be a great device for taking to defcon.
can it take any sim?
I think it supports most of the common bands.
I intend to get a Fairphone 5 or 6 and test-drive Ubuntu Touch on it, hoping to daily drive it… but it’s all theoretical at this point. If I can’t get a real Linux distro to do everything I want reliably, Lineage OS is my fallback plan. I believe in the Fairphone mission, so that’ll be my next hardware purchase either way
Can you use Signal on a Linux phone? I know there’s a desktop Linux client, but it relies on being activated from an Android or iPhone app to function, in my experience.
https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/apps/ can run Android apps with Waydroid. I don’t know if Signal works with this, but Android apps run with good performance using Waydroid (I just read about it, never used it myself).
I don’t have experience with mobile Linux (still on Android), but you can emulate Android apps through Waydroid and that would (probably) work. Granted, Idk if notifications would work, but that’s an option if mobile Linux can handle Waydroid. There’s also Molly, which is a signal client that doesn’t rely on Google Play Services for notifications.
Better not to use Signal. It’s intentionally made less secure by requiring a phone number.
Wire is better. Native Linux app. No phone number needed.
Signal is important to some of my contacts and its E2E encryption is excellent. The only thing the phone number gives away to the outside is “has this person used Signal in the past?”. Since it is not illegal to use Signal in my country, I’m not worried.
