2024 year of the Linux D̶e̶s̶k̶t̶o̶p̶ phone
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Nothing would make me more happy. I really wish it weren’t such a pain to deal with the telephony. You check devices on postmarketOS & while some devices can boot, it’s usually the actual phone part that isn’t working--which is kind of an important part. The open hardware phones work fine, but their specs are ancient while being as expensive as flagships. I still have eventual hope tho as device needs have started to plateau.
I believe (and this just a believe) that one Linux-first phone with actually working hardware could tip the nonstopping swing. Not for "average" user anytime in maybe even next decade, but there are a lot of people bored with current smartphones, tinkers or just wanting more privacy above than unverificable and unproven promises from Apple and Google.
Unfortunately given the stalemate of the mobile duopoly & service providers like banks thinking attestation is okay & what you run on your hardware is their business, Linux phones will have a hell of an uphill battle to take on. Wild to me is hearing the average Joe is happy their phones now don’t let them do whatever they want & they like the attestation since they don’t trust themselves with operating the device. These are the masses that will obviously be catered to, but maybe eventually be the only ones supported as banking websites age with little maintenance & receive no feature parity.
"We put a padlock on your hood, so now you have no choice but to come to us for oil changes and maintenance."
"That's great guys, thanks!" self flagellates
We literally already have Linux phones, but i would love to cut some bullshit in the middle and go more upstream one day
Imagine a full Linux desktop experience while plugged into a monitor and then a mobile experience on the go. That's the dream.
I think Canonical pitched this about 10 years ago.
10 years ago was the time to start, too.
Imagine a Linux-like OS for mobile as a reasonable 3rd mobile operating system. People would run it and seem weird like when people run Linux on their laptop nowadays. 1-2% market share. Basically nothing is native to it but a handful of open source apps, but waydroid would be more complete. That would be beautiful.
Shoot. Imagine a reasonably new phone running something Linux with a shell laptop that lets you properly converge. Linux has the best ARM support because basically anything can be complied.
That's what Samsung tried with Dex. You could even run an honest to god (emulated) Linux on it. Unfortunately, it didn't work out and no one knows about it today.
Dex could have been the dream. That wm, it's soo bad. Then the apps have too much control over their resize and only one instance of an app running.
I could have daily driven it if it was just a little more consistent
Shame that it's closed source and by Samsung. :/
Yeah, but to be fair it seems more feasible now. Maybe one day!
I have a sd8 gen 2 phone and with this amount of power i wouldnt even need a laptop. I mainly use mine for programming and school work but the most i see on it is 30% and i think this phone could handle it. Maybe compiling is a different story...
Samsung offered this for a short while with Linux on Dex. You could easily run a lightweight Ubuntu Desktop container when plugged in. Sadly they removed it after a few months.
I think you can run a proot distro on dex
What are you saying they removed here? I'm using Dex with a Z Fold4 as I type this. Don't even have a laptop or desktop anymore. All I ever need is my phone nowadays.
But it won't integrate that much. You won't get exactly the same app on mobile and desktop in environment mixed like that.
You can get this with a Pinephone and a USB-C dock. Both experiences leave a lot to be desired, but it's there.
As someone who owns a PinePhone I can tell you that a lot more work needs to be done first. postmarketOS is ok but being Alpine based means you have to forever deal with all the issues that come with it including its primitive package manager. And mobian also kept breaking ever other half a year or so requiring manual config changes etc.
What we need IMO, is a more reliable spin like Fedora, maybe even something immutable like Silverblue to ensure the stability required for a daily driver device while also being quick to deploy the latest versions of releases.
There's also the whole app ecosystem aspect but between advances in Waydroid and convergent GTK apps, I'm more concerned about the underlying base OS than the app ecosystem ^^
Biggest limit for me is the battery life still.
I would love to be able to use a Linux mobile as my primary but I know that's not going to happen, unfortunately.
Maybe some tech giant pumping money in a 3rd eco-system would help, i think it's very likely to happen one day
I am using the PinePhonePro as my primary phone for over a year now. There are of course some challanges but it is definitly possible
How do you like the software support, and which OS are you using?
I'm getting "Android Gingerbread on an HTC EVO" vibes, which is not a bad thing. It stands out, in a good way.
Love the look of this, would love to be able to use this on my current phone