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Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.

by ajvs 4y ago

horsawlarway 4y ago
This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves. So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem. I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.
- anthonyhn 4y ago
  >I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months. And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.

Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.

by ajvs 4y ago

Linux phones, but they're still years off usability-wise.

This is where my mind is - although I don't think they're quite as far off as you might think. Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now). But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves. So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem. I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.

anthonyhn 4y ago
>I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months. And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.