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.
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?
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 just fat-fingered myself into a need for a new phone. I’d really like to get away from Android, but I’ve yet to hear anyone say any smartphone running Linux is ready for daily driving.
😢
Huh, I’ve never noticed you write a message without the need to replace a “th” before.
Sometimes, sentences come togeþer wiþ so many in a row I feel self-conscious. More rarely, I produce one, or none.
You become hyper-aware of how heavily English relies on “th” when you walk þis paþ.
Did you ever read that book that was written without using the letter “e”? Now there’s something on which English - the word itself even - depends.
la disparition?
I think you’re making a joke I’m too oblivious to get, but in case I was wrong:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
(Not to be confused with a similarly titled book that definitely uses the letter ‘e’)
Oh, it wasn’t a joke, I’m just french and though you were referring to the french novel la disparition that is also written with no e’s
A book without it? I couldn’t show the world a short post not including it! Why though? This is so hard for our brains. 💀
for fun I would say, although I must add that making a short post without including a awfully common part of our common language is a task that can be brought about without too much labor.
I know, I was trying to josh 😭 you almost did it though! Doing this also allow to find about words you don’t know!
On þe oþer end, I believe þere’s also a book where every word except articles starts wiþ “s”.
That sounds like an alliterative challenge.
I have been waiting for 10 years or more. And it still isn’t. It will never be unfortunately.
I do think it will move way faster the shitter android gets.
Facts. At first there was such an enthusiastic Android crowd who was having so much fun with it. (Not to mention contributing TONS of free labor and promotion.)
And now Google is just saying “NO! NOT YOURS! WE’RE GREEN APPLE NOW!”
I hope those actual genius nerds who love user-centric tech accelerate an alternative just out of sheer spite at this point.
Tbh I would love to tinker around with my 3-year-old phone and get something working (I believe it was running Android 12 on last update), but I don’t necessarily have the time, willingness, or even knowledge of where to start. I’m a hobbyist programmer who mostly does full-stack web development these days with a sprig of application programming on Desktop. I’ve never even tried to go into mobile tech, and when I did, it was for small things like a Raspberry Pi which is essentially an ARM computer that can run mostly anything an AMD computer can. Phones aren’t like that.
Really, its a function of how many of us give these companies money to buy their hardware
So, yeah, the shittier android gets, the more of us jump ship. The more of us jump ship, the better the ecosystem becomes.
Eh they said that about desktop Linux not that long ago
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… 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.
I’m using Sailfish OS on a Jolla C2 phone. The OS is great, very good native software and it also runs Android apps.
Wikipedia states the UI layer is propriertary, is that true?
Jolla is in the process of open sourcing components. See this forum post from today .
Some components are proprietary. See https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Open_Source/ .
How’s your experience been with the GPS? I have been using sailfish on a Sony phone and loved it but getting a GPS lock just took forever for me.
Oh yeah, I also daily drive a Sony with Sailfish (Xperia XA2) and the GPS is very unreliable to get a lock. It’s very rare that it works sadly. Other than that the phone works very well.
Yeah that kinda became a dealbreaker for me. I really wish that was better cause it’s the only thing I feel holding it back as an android alternative. Its got the apps (thru android emulation), the control and freedom to brick it as you want. Just needs the GPS sorted and its great! (Yes things could be better but I can forgive those issues)
Works well enough for me, it’s comparable to my Android phones. But I’m not a heavy GPS user.
Have you done anything to get that? I have not been able to get decent GPS unless I planned 20 mins in advance
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.
