Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations (link to 2025 Priorities -> Focus on Reliabilty, Audi, Camera, etc)
Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations (link to 2025 Priorities -> Focus on Reliabilty, Audi, Camera, etc)
Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones
A notable mention is https://ubports.com/en/ which is different from postmarketos in a sense that ubports uses old kernels with heavy patches. That means: good support for things, but difficult future.
PostmarketOS uses the newest kernels and tries to integrate their patches into mainline kernel, so that the reliability is maintained with all kernel developers.
I am sorely tempted, but its unlikely my banking apps and very specific work 2fa app is anything but Apple and Android compatible. I am almost at the stage of getting a second phone for day to day, and keeping my old for specific apps
You should consider changing bank if they don't provide a regular website with at least the same functions as their app.
just give us a headphone jack and removable storage and you'll have a customer for life.
Xperia 1 VI?
Government should make standards for banks to support different operating systems. Not particularly well known OS.
I can't wait for Linux phones to be stable enough for a daily driver.
2026 will be the year of the linux phone
Please stop. I can’t get my dick back into my trousers.
Given that Win10 is getting deprecated this year and Win11 has specific hardware requirements, I think 2025 could be the year of the linux PC. I'll be curious to see how massive corporations for which this would mean millions or billions in hardware upgrades to stick with Win will square that circle.
XD
The FuriPhone, which runs the FuriOS Linux distribution (based on Debian), has a polished enough user experience that it can be used as a daily driver by many people.
It seems like Linux-compatible android handsets stopped around 2021. Except a few bespoke models that are hard to get your hands on outside of Europe.
I have a OnePlus Nord N10 flashed with Ubuntu Touch as a tinker device, unfortunately in the US it's not daily-able because we shut down 3g and 2g networks and they still haven't managed to get VoLTE working on Ubuntu Touch yet (though it may be coming in the next year!) so phone calls don't work.
There's also the Pixel 3a/3a XL which are plentiful and cheap but I like the N10 a bit more because of the additional RAM. Makes it feel a little less old compared to the Pixel.
If you can get your hands on a Fairphone, Pinephone or Volla those are great but hard to get outside the EU.
Good luck, phone hardware changes very fast though.
Maybe whenever slider phones with full keyboards come back. Typing in the terminal would be a real chore otherwise.
You do get used to it to some degree, but yes please bring the keyboards back
I mean probably never? You'd have to design hardware specifically that's compatible with Linux, which would cost a fortune, in the hopes of selling a whole bunch of them, and they can't even get large numbers of people to use Linux for free.
The best solution today is to get actual phone / text apps working on the handhelds and just start using steamdecks etc lmao.
VOIP solutions obviously already do work.
Be nice if Linux phones could be like how Samsung phones used to be before they started removing features to directly compete with Apple smartwatch markets. I don't understand how competition=downgrades because they wanna stretch features out to sell more products than how it used to be when both companies were all about being the One Phone That Does it All. I can afford the one gadget, always have and always will, but especially now when everything is so expensive I can only ever afford the Samsung A-Series not their main marketed S line.
But, do you ever need anything more than a A series phone? Or just want?
give me ANYTHING that's open-source and not tied to google or apple. i don't care if it's shit. i'm old. i just need a phone and maybe some pics and browsing.
SailfishOS is fully functional and usable if you do not need any playstore-only apps. Even then they have now implemented microg in v5.0
GrapheneOS is an open-source Android fork lots of people like, it's what I'm planning on using once I get a new phone
While I'm a fan of GrapheneOS, I think it could still be considered "tied to Google" both due to it being based on Android, and also because it only runs on Google Pixel phones. Graphene focuses more on security, then on privacy, but not so much on reducing our dependency on Google's software and/or hardware.
Pinephone. Daily driver of you have low expectations. Not great for pictures.
Do you live in the US or Europe? There are some possibilities out there, but it's kinda region dependent.
Cool, does it run on a Galaxy Xcover6 Pro with a Verizon plan? I bet it doesn't, nothing does besides the big-2 OS's it seems.
Eventually I'll try one. I feel like it can be like desktop Linux where it take a very many many long years until it starts to chip away at single digit values of market share
It's worse. Linux desktop is only possible because of the relative consistency and openness of x86 PC hardware. Phones are nothing like that. At best we will have retro Linux handhelds with phone functionality.
This is the reason I haven’t given it a chance.
Not that I’m unwilling, but with no common hardware, I’m reluctant to go out and buy something.
I can go buy a pinephone for postmarket, but won’t work for sailfish. I can get an Xperia for sailfish, but I’m out of luck for postmarket.
Not to mention, I’m reluctant to drop a chunk of cash on aged hardware, whose successor doesn’t look to be as well supported.
It’s much less effort to have something based on Android open source project though.
It's also less interesting.
Using regular Linux means you can do a ton of stuff you currently can't on Android:
- plug in a USB hub and use it like a desktop - Steam Deck does this
- run regular desktop/server software - want a portable Minecraft server? Go for it!
- do things w/ btrfs snapshots so you can restore phone state if you mess something up (e.g. I accidentally uninstalled an app and lost settings)
- keep getting security updates long past when anyone in their right mind expects to get them
Android is already FOSS, and you can get phones with minimal stuff on top of the FOSS core. That's cool I guess, and I use one such distro (GrapheneOS), but it's still Android at the end of the day. I want something different, but I still want basic phone stuff to work (calls, SMS, MMS, camera, etc).
Realistically, I would probably try a google free Android long before I'd try a more pure linux phone
Ive tried a couple of times, ended up bricking a phone and had to re-do another. Linux phones are hard to get set up (for certain models).
Cool, does it run on a Galaxy S10 series phone?
it does, but not particularly well
Can i play minecraft on it though? Ive got a horse ranch that I'd really like to continue
Java is inherently cross platform, and works well on linux. So assuming the phone is powerful enough, you should be good to go even if it's linux.
Definitely worth checking out Minetest/Luanti though, it has promise.
Absolutely! The controls might suck and regular phone features might be iffy, but you could totally run the Java version of Minecraft if you wanted. No guarantees about performance though.