When I have read anything Android phone related on Lemmy, I often see comments talking about how they switch to Linux phone or tell people to swap Android with Linux ASAP.

What’s the general experience like using Linux as your phone and is it any good? I remember watching video couple years about it and hearing about it and the lack of apps (at least that is made for mobile in mind) and wonder if that has changed or is it just good enough.

    • mal3oon@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      That’s a neat resource list! I don’t know why anyone wants to torture themselves porting void to mobile, cool nonetheless!

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org
    3·
    5 hours ago

    ubports was pretty good last I tried but there were basically no apps. that was on xenial so it may be a bit better now especially with waydroid.

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    43·
    18 hours ago

    I put PostmarketOS on a spare device recently. PostmarketOS describes itself as currently being in a state suitable for Linux enthusiasts to try out, not for wider use. That seems about right to me.

    On the fun side, it’s proper desktop-style Linux. I can SSH to it from my laptop. I can compile software on it. I can run programs that have no business running on a phone. On the not so fun side, the cameras barely work, data over USB doesn’t work at all, and battery life is not good. Desktop Firefox on a phone screen is pretty bad. Rumor has it there’s some support for Android apps, but I’ve been looking at Waydroid’s splash screen for a long time now with no progress.

  • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
    31·
    18 hours ago

    PostmarketOS makes no claim that it is ready to be a daily driver, Linux phones are pretty experimental right now. That’s why there is so much tension over the custom ROMs that manage to function on such locked-down hardware

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    24·
    18 hours ago

    I wouldn’t consider any Linux phone ecosystem developed enough to consider a “daily driver” phone yet. If you need a phone to be functional at pretty much all times as a phone, but you don’t want to give into smartphones, I honestly would suggest a VOIP landline (that you potentially roll out and serve yourself, depending on your level of technical ability and available resources).

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    18·
    18 hours ago

    They all have issues. The OS portion is just ramping up again brought on by the Google coup on Android.

    Honestly, you’d be better off getting something that runs a better Android OS for now versus running a Linux derivative.

    The main issues:

    • Camera sensor support and control
    • Modem (phone) stability
    • Sensor support
    • Biometric sensor support
    • Specialized hardware support
  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    18 hours ago

    The closest to a daily driver you can get to is Sailfish OS on a supported phone. There’s a lot if amazing work in the linux phone space as the bar for daily driver is fairly high.

    • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
      6·
      17 hours ago

      Maemo on the N900 was close, but MeeGo on the N9 was there. The Ovi store even had the hot apps of the era.

      Fuck Microsoft for killing that dream.

  • uKale@lemmy.world
    9·
    18 hours ago

    I daily drive Ubuntu touch and like it very much, but I can see how that would be hard in certain situations. Keep doing some research, and pick one that seems to fit your needs to try it out! Only you can decide if it is good enough for your particular circumstances.

  • cevn@lemmy.world
    5·
    16 hours ago

    I had a pine phone for a while and it was sufficiently developed to use it as a daily driver… if you could put up with dropped calls, and texts, and burning thru ur whole battery in one hour cuz sleep didn’t work.

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
    71·
    17 hours ago

    If you’re coming from a feature phone - it’s great!

    If you’re coming from a modern smartphone, you probably won’t be happy with it as a daily driver.

    I’m voting with my feet, but carrying two devices.

    • edinbruh@feddit.itEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      I would like to interject for a moment. This statement is technically true but disingenuous and facetious.

      While it’s true that Linux is just the kernel, what most people refer to as Linux is actually the Operating System GNU/Linux, or, as RMS would now call it, GNU plus Linux, or sometimes, a less GNU depended, but mostly GNU/Linux compatible OS, or, as I have literally just now come to call it */Linux.

      Moreover, a modern */Linux system is expected to be based on SystemD, unless explicitly avoiding it due to some technical constraint or some desired feature of another init system. One could come to call this SystemD/Linux.

      And lastly, this kind of use case would be the perfect match for a Wayland shell, as opposed to an X11 shell. Which would be more efficient, and would give the shell more freedom in the management of windows.

      As a result, when asking about a Linux phone, we could expect one is talking about a phone running a SystemD+Wayland/Linux OS, or at least a mobile-focused */Linux OS.

      The Android kernel is a, largely downstream, fork of the Linux kernel, but the Android OS is in almost no way compatible with any */Linux OS, and it’s instead its own completely different OS.