If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the fur iphone 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 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...

>fur iphone

Science has gone too far!

Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.

> so your are forced to connect with your Google account

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...

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 fine (phosh with gnome-calls)

feel free to ask questions you may have

Here is one recent report after using PinePhone with PostmarketOS and Phosh for a few years:

Daily Driving a Linux Phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750756 - 2 days ago (3 points, 2 comments)

I do, a Oneplus 6, PMOS "edge" with OpenRC + Phosh. Everything is fine, except I still need to reboot the phone after each call to be sure to have the audio working

How is 4G calling (VoLTE) these days? Last I heard it needed quite a bit of a manual work to get it going.

Sailfish(OS) supports VoLTE in newer, supported devices. For community ports and other mobile Linux distros it's afaik still rare. Closed drivers and obtaining configurations for carriers in other countries are the 2 big showstoppers.

I have a OnePlus 6 becoming "free" soon and I will definitely give PostmarketOS a shot (I had a glance at their compatibility list and noticed the OP6 is on there). Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

I run an older Android phone without a Google account. All apps are from F-Droid. Google services are all turned off. Mail is Thunderbird, browser is Fennec.

Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?

Yes, I do this routinely.

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/

It should be said though that only Pixel, Fairphone, and maybe some Motorolas support relocking the bootloader with a custom OS.

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.

Yes, it is.

Lookup LineageOS and CalyxOS. I use CalyxOS with MicroG and can download apps from the app store without a Google account or Google services (although some apps won't work without them of course).

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 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?

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 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.

> What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone?

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.

I know right, when will Android vendors actually release security patches on time?

GrapheneOS only supports a few specific Google phones, so it's not an option for most cases

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 Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.

I agree with your overall point but the following comment is unnecessary:

> 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.

One of these days I'll get a phone that can run Genode's Sculpt Movile OS.

This website is hostile to scrolling on mobile, I've never seen a worse UX pattern in my life.

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.

“The year of the Linux desktop” has always been a stupid statement because it never quantifies what the success criteria is.

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”?

Do people still use desktops?

To answer your question.

> 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?

Linux desktop is very pleasant to use now compared to 5 years before. I tried a lot of times to switch to linux before but it never stuck, now I use only linux on my desktop.

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

I blocked reader mode and it worked fine. Not an excuse, but it is common for sites to not work well for phones. I find it a bit surprising these days but hey, Wikipedia knows how to redirect desktop links to mobile versions but not the reverse and they have the great foresight to add an automatic option to dark mode settings but wild idiocy to set the default configuration to light mode.

I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed

Good luck. Almost every service you need for a smart phone to be "smart" anything requires being part of the Google or Apple botnet. Yeah, you can install whatever crap you like on your phone. Maybe it will do SMS? Kewl. Want maps, mobile banking, 2-factor auth, different password managers, music streaming, and so on... good luck without one of the app stores. Also, being unplugged sometimes means your phone won't even work for calling beyond SMS. Since its baked into the ROM image and you have to hope that the devs have added support for your hardware. So you trade a smart phone (a useful device for the modern world) for a goofy neckbeard terminal in your pocket (too small to be used for any complex input.)