The community around Linux phones is interesting. The phones do sell to a lot of people, but it seems a lot of those people come back to complain that Linux phones isn’t what they expected it is.
For some reason all the distributions for the PinePhone are bending over backwards to provide an Android or iOS experience on the phone. The operating systems are judged on the amount of apps preinstalled and every tiny issue labels the distribution as completely unusable.
Stability doesn’t matter at all, as long as there are features! more features! Doesn’t matter there are 20 patches on top of every package and things aren’t upstreamed. Doesn’t matter if the kernel is full of hacks with no upstream in sight for most things.
The currently available ‘true’ Linux phones do not seem to be, well, any good. They’ve got a lot of work ahead of them, and anybody expecting a fully functioning smartphone experience from the PinePhone or Librem 5 will be disappointed. I have no clue about possible solutions to this problem.
Just too far behind at this point. Exactly the same situation with Linux desktops against Windows and Mac OS.
Would be great to have a real 3rd platform.
Yeah, but it must start somewhere though…
True, but they will never go mainstream. I mean Samsung hasn’t been able to get its Linux version off the ground, Amazon and Facebook with all their resources have both flopped.
I hope someone can come along and be the Tesla of Linux phones.
Pretty sure the Tizen phones eork quite well, but they only really sell in India. I happen to love my Galaxy Watch that is also Tizen based.
The Nokia N9 would have survived a long life with MeeGo, if MS hadn’t trojaned it.
Are we missing x86 already? You see, x86 might be a sub-optimal ISA (which annoys academics), but the PC architecture around x86 CPUs is the closest thing we’ve gotten to a standard computer architecture (save for GPU acceleration, which was never standardised, though Intel’s drivers are the next best thing). Imagine a phone you can “boot” with standard Debian like you can a PC. No special images needed.
Meanwhile, ARM is just… oof! Every board a different thing.
kurkosdr,
+1, begrudgingly.
x86 computers are not an ideal standard, but the fact that I can boot nearly universal bootloaders and kernels is unquestionably a huge benefit. I talk about my x86 gripes a lot, but the computer industry has been extremely fortunate to have PCs that empower owners and are largely interchangeable between vendors. People take that for granted, but we shouldn’t… it’s not that far fetched for openness to become a causality in any switch to ARM.
Edit: I want to see more competition with ARM, but any loss of owner freedoms is going to come at a huge cost to developers, consumers, and innovation in the future.
Absolutely no.
Linux is enough for my PC and laptop where I have too much sex fixing issues – I don’t want the same “experience” with my phone. I want to use it, not serve it.
You must be the first Linux user to complain about too much sex.
I’d love to have sex with a woman, not personal computing devices.
birdie,
Why not have both? 🙂
I would love to have a primary mobile device that wasn’t locked into Android, Apple, or other ecosystems. I’ve been following the PinePhone and plan on buying one once it has some reasonable feature set. That would be it can make a phone call, do texting, and has a half decent battery life. The addressable audience is pretty small though. Most people don’t care about how much they are tracked online or being locked into vendors. Honestly most people are probably better served by having Apple and Google curate the apps they can download and install through their app stores. I just hate that we are stuck with these two controlling the entire marketplace. Of course a free phone doesn’t have to be running Linux. There are ways to accomplish that with Android but I’d want that to be a first class citizen not essentially jailbreaking old phones to make that work.
HankG,
I agree with that. The majority of people have bought into the apple vs android battlelines, and nearly 100% of development resources is shared by these two platforms exclusively. This is about as dumb and shortsighted as having a two party political system representing the electorate. There’s not enough there to really represent everyone’s interests and we end up having to align ourselves with the platforms rather the other way around. The result can be crappy either way you go.
Depends on your usage, web based application should work on every phone, be it Android, iOS or whatever else based. I can understand a downloaded/installed application works offline, yet you are required to remain 24/7 online to use them now. I own a HTC Evo3D from 2011 and a LG G3 and these are all off the grid, I install stuff on them only when I’m home, using wifi. Avoiding as much as possible being tracked is possible, just change your habits. Hence using a Linux phone is possible, through web apps if native apps aren’t available. But as others, my main concern is the constant maintenance Linux still requires. At least security updates should follow, where Android is lagging behind by a lot in that regard.
I’ve been using a pinephone as my main phone since november, it took me two weeks to make it mine but I’ll not switch back.
It might not have everything a smartphone user expects, but it fills my needs and covers more of what I expect from a pocket computer than the duopoly and without bloat. I think many osnews readers seek the same 🙂 (of course it still acts as a phone)
I’d love to see more news about these mobile platforms here 😉
vs.
I rest my case.
Jokes aside the “bloatware” problem was relevant maybe ten years ago when devices weren’t powerful to handle everything thrown at them and nowadays you must be obsessed with “purity” ’cause otherwise bloatware is no longer an issue absolute most people even know/remember about. Besides Android has allowed to disable most preinstalled uninstallable apps with ease almost since inception: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/
Lastly, your so called “free” and bloat-free smartphone is lacking 99.99% of apps available for Android/iOS which makes it useless junk unless you’re OK with an extremely limited number of apps in which case I struggle to understand why you needed to buy it in the first place when you could have installed bloat-free LineageOS on your old phone and call it a day.
In short you now have the skills which are mostly worthless if not for mental gymnastics.
Glad you found my post interesting enough to reply 😉
I totally agree with you and think you’re totally sane …
My first Android phone was an htc magic running Android 1.6, I was finding it really cool to have a Linux phone in my pocket … since then I’ve been using some androids and custom roms. The last is a redmi note 8t, which I was using as came (with some apps disabled).
I didn’t buy the pinephone to use it a phone … I just wanted an sbc with integrated screen and battery to play with. I was curious about how it behaved as a phone and I liked it so it is now my main phone.
These phone are not ready for mass market and will probably never be more than what is linux on the desktop (1% market share) but they provide a different experience that should interest osnew community. Beware I read lots of bad experiences with these phone in the forums. I think nobody should expect much from them …
On the other hand, android and ios are designed to sell media and apps even if one is not obliged to consume of course, and can even remove the stores or use alternatives as f-droid. Being away of it made me think. The concept of app sounds now very commercial to me (well people nedd to make a living).
fdlamotte,
That’s an excellent point! Sometimes it can be cumbersome to add a screen / battery to an SBC, but a linux based phone might get you there with better integration and less effort.
For example I considered building my own thermostat, electronically it isn’t hard to come up with an arduino circuit, but I lack the ability to fabricate a nice case and any UI would have been inferior to a phone.
I find these pinephones a bit expensive compared to typical SBCs, but obviously it’s more complete than something like a raspberry pi. I’m very curious what you’ve used them for. I probably should look it up, but do they make GPIO practical?
I didn’t have a specific purpose apart tinkering … I’ve bought a second unit for this purpose now I use the first as a phone.
For the ios you only have access to the i2c port through pogo pins meant to build smartcovers. They provide adapters to use them.
There is also an uart that shares the audio jack.
Finally, you can use the usb port.
Well, there is also the https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x
Which seems like a beast in specs.
It would be great if androidvm would be a standard in Linux mobile phones. It would increase the amount of possible apps.
Or something like https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager which does a decent job for things like spotify or whatsapp on my desktop.
It would be a dream for me to have a Linux phone with private mail like tutanota and syncing of stuff with syncthing (or something else). No whatsapp anymore, but Signal. And games? Well, maybe I should grow up and skip them.
But Android and iOs or especially far ahead in commercial success. That might be the biggest difference.
The price, buddy, the price. $850 ? More expensive than a laptop ? Seriously ?
Anyway, that perfectly sum up my fear about Linux phones :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCKMxzz9cjs
We already have usable Linux phones and use them a whole lot. What some of us would love to have, and still don’t have, is usable GNU/Linux phones.
Do I want a Linux phone? Yes.
And I’ve been using Sailfish (and it is a pure Linux phone, not fully FOSS, but still Linux phone) since its release and that means for last 7,5 years. Works fine for daily use.
I’ve been testing also Pinephone+Manjaro+Plasma Mobile. It has a lot of promise, but for me is still quite far from the daily usage milestone.