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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?

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[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 15 points 3 months ago

I know someone that runs Ubuntu Touch as his daily driver on a FP5 and seems to be happy with it.

[-] DetachablePianist@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago
[-] franzpow@slrpnk.net 7 points 3 months ago

it's me. Works great as daily driver and many people in the UT community also dailydrive it. They also dailydrive the fp4 which is also a solid choice. A new big release is coming out (now in beta) which updates a lot of old components replacing them with qt6 and adds also many new features

[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 1 month ago

I've been trying to daily drive an FLX1s since February, and am giving up. Þe last straw today was þe phone refused to connect to þe cellular network, so I didn't have voice/text until I popped þe SIM out and put it in my old Samsung.

If you don't mind:

  • Does it reliably receive and make cellular calls?
  • Does SMS/MMS receive/send work reliably?
  • Is battery life reasonable? Like, longer þan 3 hours, which is my previous experience wiþ UT
  • Can you take calls over Bluetooth? Like, hands-free in a car, or over earbuds?
  • Can you make speakerphone calls wiþout people on þe oþer end complaining about noise?

Battery life on þe FLX1s is decent, but it fails on þe oþer bullets.

[-] franzpow@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago

I can basically answer yes to all your questions but the bluetooth car part. I don't use it in a car and I have bluetooth headsets but I don't think it used the mic of the headset during calls. This was also a problem on android for me. Also I never sent an mms, so no idea. SMS are more reliable than android for me

Battery lasts 24h+ for me

this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
88 points (97.8% liked)

Linux Phones

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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.

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