Written by community member paint-attract-repeat, he details his experience with the FLX1s

The TL;DR version of this is that FLX1s is a Linux phone which has moved from being of interest to techie enthusiasts to working as an everyday phone - and computer - for a non-tech person.

[…]I describe myself as a "Linux enthusiast". I'm not a Linux novice, I've used it for about a decade. But I am only an end-user of Linux. I'm one of those people the more techie types are writing the software for, and I appreciate you all very much, and contribute (financially) where I can. I can't write software myself, I happily install software that is packaged ready to install, but drop out of the game if I have to "compile" it myself - I don't really understand what that means - let alone write it or code it myself.[…]

You might wonder why I got into Linux? I run my own small business. And I too frequently in the early days (it's 20 years old this year) got my fingers burned when big tech companies were able to hold me to ransom. One particular story that sticks in my mind - not that I'm bitter 😂 - is that we invested in Skype Phones and a Skype number for our telephony. And after Microsoft bought Skype, it decided it wasn't interested in going down that path, and a software update literally remotely bricked all the hardware we had purchased... I became determined I needed as far as possible, to understand, and to have control over, my own tech. And of course, to have nothing to do with Microsoft.

When I unboxed my new, orange Jolla phone, I remembered the long forgotten FirefoxOS phone. I liked it…

This might be particularly useful in the US/Canada where the Pixel line is almost the only phone line that can be bootloader unlocked and where VoLTE is required essentially everywhere if you actually want to use your phone as a phone.

There's an Ubuntu Touch test image for the Pixel 5 with VoLTE if anyone has an old phone sitting around that they want to test with.

See [https://forums.ubports.com/topic/12584/google-pixel-5-redfin]

947,807 views Premiered May 3, 2025 #linux #raspberrypi #diy
This is how (and why) I made my own, fully functional wearable cellphone with a Raspberry Pi Zero and how I bypassed both the law and every single restriction in a school network with it!
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This makes Gajim actually usable on mobile devices.

So, after following the discussions for quite a while, I decided to pull it off.

Having gone though the support list of various distributions, I chose Pixel 3a for my setup. Among the dirt cheap smartphones, it seems to enjoy the support of almost everything.

I decided to install PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile. In the meanwhile, I also tested Mobian (didn't work for me for some reason) and Gnome (I ended up being too much of a KDE fanboy).

The overall experience is, honestly, mixed. It sure is exciting, and I've spent a whole day tinkering here and there (and feeling a bit nostalgic for the day I felt this way about Linux as a whole), the hardware support was a pleasant surprise, up to multipoint Bluetooth TWS headphones, but still, system stability isn't anywhere near a daily driver, and software support lags behind in many ways.

In any case, now I too have a platform to look into the future. Year of Linux mobile, anyone? :)

P.S. Any advice on censorship-resistant (VLESS/Reality/AmneziaWG-based) VPNs for PostmarketOS on ARM devices?

chelydra is a GUI interface for starting and stopping snapclient.

It's an MVP -- it's the bare minimum to do what I need it to do, which is provide a toggle to start and stop snapclient. It's Go & gioui - gioui is a fabulous library, but it doesn't provide drop-downs so until I hack up my own you have to manually enter the correct values in text fields.

This is meant for phones. It's laid out assuming limited screen space in portrait mode. It's a single binary, although the package contains a .desktop and icon so it shows up in a launcher. It uses almost no CPU, as you'd expect.

Importantly, I do build packages, and there are arm64 .debs that can be downloaded and installed -- I think all of the mobile Linuxii are debian-based. You can find a link to the assets on the project page. I have only an FLX1s to test on, but I'm cross-compiling on an amd64 and there shouldn't be anything particularly coupled with FuriOS.

I don't use AI, and none was involved in chelydra. It's, like, 81 LOC... why would there be?

An Aside

Mobile Linux doesn't benefit much from the vast library of software available to most Linuxes; some of this is because a majority of GUI programs are designed for landscape windows with a lot of real estate for multiple panels, menus, and so on. A second reason is because a lot of stuff still doesn't compile cleanly for arm64, which is what most mobile phones have in them. And oddly, when I do find projects, many of them don't provide binaries for some reason, and it can be difficult to gather the requirements to compile binaries for arm. Consequently, I'm constantly running into situations where I need some little program for which there are dozens of options for the desktop and yet none for my phone. I've started putting them here -- there are only two at the moment, but there will be more.

VLC works well on mobile, but the UI is not great for that.

Can it be configured to work well on mobile, such as with mobile-config-firefox and mobile-config-thunderbird?

I like having the Chromecast compatibility for example. I've watched a video streamed from my Mobian phone to a Chromecast (from a Samba share) including conversion to another format and it just worked.

Now I'd like to have improved UI, as I'm not aware of other apps that implement the API for casting to a Chromecast.

How's the experience? I tried it on fp4 1-2 years ago, and it was pretty unstable for daily driving at the time. I returned to android for a while, and now I'm running PostmarketOS on this. It works reasonably well, but phone call audio doesn't work yet (speakers altogether started working just earlier this year) and that's kind of a dealbreaker. The development is also slow, as all the work is done by a single person (huge kudos to Luca Weiss).

So I'm thinking to maybe give Ubuntu Touch a shot. Tell me your experiences with it on a fp4.

Bonus question: wireguard is pretty important to my day-to-day life. Is it yet working? I remember that it was broken, couldn't install it due to something about drivers... There were workarounds, none of them worked on a fp4.

I just ordered a FairPhone 5 for the purpose of test-driving any reasonable Linux solutions on it. My eventual preference will probably be Mobian or Postmarket OS with plasma-mobile, but those appear to require additional dev time before they're practical daily drivers, especially on the FP5. Ubuntu Touch appears to be a reasonably mature option, and they specifically single out the FairPhone 5 on their website as the best supported hardware right now. I believe this maturity may be largely due to utilizing closed source Android blobs to drive phone hardware which isn't ideal for us FOSS purists but at least has the advantage of accelerating their dev efforts.

I assume this won't become my main phone right away, but I'm curious whether this community believes Ubuntu Touch (or something else) on a FP5 could potentially be a reasonable daily driver by now. A similar post from about year ago answered No, though their question didn't specify which hardware.

Thoughts? Maybe an alternate distro I should at look at for the FP5 specifically?

This might be useful to some people that want to use a DHL Packstation, but use a Linux phone and don't want to run the proprietary app in Waydroid.

Waydroid has been packaged and is now available in Unstable: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/waydroid

It should be available in Testing in a few days.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46776421

Title. I made a space to try and encapsulate all the known Linux Mobile Projects. Ideally this could've been a list or directory of sorts, but since I didn't find one, I kinda just decided to make one. - it's inspired by postmarketOS' space.

You can find it at #mobile-linux-rooms:nope.chat -- Could've had a better name but frankly couldn't think of a better name at the time.

Includes

• PostmarketOS
• NixOS (whole)
• Mobian (Unofficial Space made for this)
• Droidian
• UBPorts
• Fedora PocketBlue
• OpenSUSE Mobile
• SailfishOS (Unofficial Space made for this)
• Pine64 (whole)
• KDE (whole)
• Phosh
• Gnome Mobile (room only)

I'm not too knowledgeable about cellular equipment, but I was wondering how much of the phone based data actually gets to the SIM card.

Would it be possible, by sniffing the connection to the card, to listen to the content of calls and mobile data? Or would it be possible to get tower information in a similar format to rayhunter?

I understand there is some encryption, would getting the keys for that enable some of the previous ideas?

I have several noob questions about Linux on mobile

1. Why can you brick android phone by installing custom ROM. But such thing can't happen on x86? Or how likely is that. From what I read it is because it doesn't have bios and you can overwrite phone hardware drivers how true is that with recent devices? And I assume it is impossible to recower from software bricking?
2. Is that true that on Halium kernel distribution you can't use universal packages (flatpak, nix, snap, appimage), only precompiled for its specyfic system only? Is there any bypass of that to use something like apk like on android? Or are there any disadvantages to use it apart from EOL security.
3. Is there any good list how to start with Linux on phone? List of devices (probably oneplus 6, pixel 3a, fairphone 4), distros (probably Ubuntu touch, mobian, postmarketOS). The smoothest experience, preferably with dual boot.
4. Is there some recomended tablets to test with Linux mobile? It seems preferred way for me considering calling, camera and other issues which are on Linux mobile. Is recomended devices from postmarketos tablet tab?
5. Why battery life is worse on Linux than on android, I watched some reviews and they complained about short battery life.
6. I watched someone run Linux distros by clicking on android quick settings tray and it opened Linux desktop, but it was not mobile. How it is called and is there a way to run it with plasma mobile?
7. Is porting for newer devices getting easier with time or is getting harder?
8. How is process of jailbreaking with locked bootloader done? Can it be automated?
9. Is there megatread or some wiki with some basic question like these?

Thanks for answers. Sorry for long text.

Just got the modem on the Xperia 10 III working.

Want a small Linux phone with 5G?

It's even water-proof and cheap!

Help getting the few remaining components working and this could exist soon. ;-)

Main thing I need help with is audio. I have no idea about this, but it'd allow me to try it as a daily driver, which would help to get more stuff working.

My own Mobian build works well already. The plan is to get the remaining kernel support, upstream patches and then add the remaining bits for Mobian.

• Mainlining Status: https://git.erebion.eu/forgejo/erebion/pdx213-temp
• pmOS wiki: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sony_Xperia_10_III_(sony-pdx213)

youtu.be/U4e3znNi98Q?si=fLFsyE…

Hi all, the friendly neighborhood #sxmo stan here.

Apps listed per appearance:
#wpaperd - dissolve transition, super slow
#foot - people hate my theme for it... but I'm happy lol
#yazi
#pfetch-rs
#wf-recorder
#librewolf with firefox minima css & #tridactly addon for a qutebrowser experience
irccloud (prefer halloy but.... yeah)
wvkbd-mobintl with #suggapicker and #swipeGuess
#gomuks web (currently my favorite #matrix client) with beeper.com for lazy bridges
wofi - i have single, double, and triple down gestures for each different screen
a couple scripts i made but most i stole modified from the great codeberg.org/magdesign/sxmop6
mingle

and yes that was #morrowind via #openmw

#postmarketos @linuxphones @linuxphones @linmob

In this issue: Two XMPP Events, learn about Spaces in XMPP, a new XMPP MUC BanBot, Self-hosting UnifiedPush with Conversations as Distributor, a new member of the Slidge family, and a complete translation of JoinJabber to Portuguese (BR). …

Posting this here as we need open and decentralised communications systems and not just a phone running FOSS. :)

This is the first time something I've packaged has become part of the Debian repos.

Now lpac can be installed from Unstable and allows you to set up your eSIM on Debian phones.

It will be available in Debian Testing in two days: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/lpac

I'd rather continue working on mainlining the Xperia 10 III, but now I apparently have to figure out how to revert the latest changes on https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sony_Xperia_10_III_(sony-pdx213)

The edit added generated slop. The linked repo contains generated code. Instead of editing the device tree, it — in an amazingly dumb way — uses a Python script to search and replace two words in the device tree.

Pretty sure editing the file is easier.

Also, it is based on an old 6.12 kernel. A lot of the things done in that repo are questionable at best.

I am looking forward to changing out my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. But I am very confused of what to choose, of the many options. Here is some criteria you guys could maybe help me choose the perfect fit from:

1: has to be able to use some android apps still, because of government- & banking applications. 2: the car runs it's own android system, but android auto would be nice to still have. 3: It would be awesome to be able to use the linux phone as a pc as well. I loved the videos I have seen from ubuntu touch, where you just connect to a screen through usb c and you have a desktop environment. That is just awesome! 4: I am kind of pro EU. So if the OS is developed in europe and the phone that supports it from the factory is also EU based, it's a huge plus in my book. Not a deal breaker though. My trusy on USA has just dissapeared sadly.

Hope someone will be able to help me out here! Thank you.

Samsung disabling bootloader unlock and what Google is doing with Android reminded me that Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame exists.
And also that FSF's LibrePhone project exists, but not much progress has been seen from that.