Sony Xperia 1 II, 1III and AFAIK 1 V all do LinrageOS and are flagship phones albeit expensive out of pocket and up front.
I have mixed feels about Sony but for the Interim it’s a worthy “for right now” solution with a good camera.
PinePhone was interesting for its time but underpowered and quality could be improved on.
Librem5 is pretty decent if you measure it by Phone and SMS capabilities, those apps are okayish and it has easily pullable battery and premium aluminum side casing. But don’t expect to use a web browser on it and unoptimized apps will be slow but the camera is decent. 2008-2012 much better than pinephone camera by a lot, not flagship or even 2nd grade. This is also due to the software just “not being there” yet across the board.
At this point I am pretty much done with phones. Maybe I will use SXMO on Librem5 or something to do the basics.
I don’t think we should have phones. We should have Communicators.
Phone and SMS can be legacy and die off I just want a 5-8" device that can do Matrix and Video call and tie into StarLink Sattelite and Cell Tower and AFAIK StarLink is deploying 4G in the near future which opens up the possibility for reusing existing tech as the 4G waveband is miles whereas the 5G waveband is only optimally like 300 ft and can’t penetrate glass very well due to the wave.
In any case I think there will be significant innovation in the Linux Phone space in the next year or so for Techie Pioneers to get on board.
PostmarketOS is worth a watch too, lots of hard working people out there scratching a itch and breaking down barriers.
Hmm, interesting project from a technical perspective for sure, but I am not exactly sure why anyone would use it for anything other than testing some Linux distribution.
I mean unlike Waydroid, which helps to run “that one Android app” you need on a mobile Linux device, there isn’t really “that one Linux app” you need to run on an Android phone.
Both Pinephone and Pinephone Pro are almost fully supported, including the camera. In any case, we have only the hardware manufacturers to blame for this.
divestos.org has caught my eye. When I last installed Grapheme, you had to install eSIMs using the factory ROM then install Graphene. Divest I guess had support without Google services. I think Grapheme does now also, but before I get my next phone I’ll weigh it as an option.
I’m on LineageOS since 2016, something may have changed but I usually look up their supported hardware and pick a phone based on that. You may have to look at something relatively recent or you could end up meeting the end of their official support, which then goes into some les reliable unofficial support by random people you can find mostly on XDA.
Personally I’m looking next to a second hand Pixel, mostly out of curiosity.
Edit: forgot to address the “why”: to keep in touch with society without letting strangers access to my stuff.
…is RCS even Open Source?
On Android, the only apps to ever support it are Google Messages and Samsung Messages (because Samsung partnered with Google to do it)
UT tries to provide a phone OS, which is remarkably harder than porting a desktop distro to ARM and changing the screen size. I’m not sure what the point is of dunking on UT several times here.
The “problem” with UT is that normal GNU/Linux apps don’t work on it, or only with significant adaptations. This makes UT not really usable for people that want “real” Linux on their phones. I can understand people being unhappy about that as in the end UT isn’t really that much different from Android, which technically also runs Linux.
If you want Linux apps on your phone, wouldn’t you have to have a compat layer a la WINE except that it’s for x86->ARM rather than Windows->Linux? Wouldn’t that make using Linux apps unattractive due to the overhead slowing them down? Plus, wouldn’t devs have to implement a mobile mode for GUI apps for this to be a good UX? Not trying to bash the idea, just curious about how it would practically work.
No, why? Normal open-source Linux apps can be just compiled for ARM and most larger distros have ARM versions with pre-compiled ARM repositories. Newer Linux apps are also already responsive and usually work reasonably well on smaller screens and touchscreens, although some further improvements in that regard could be made.
Having a GTK app for accessing Lemmy would be great. I can’t think of accessing Mastodon without Tuba, it is so damn comfy. It would be great to have something similar for Lemmy as well
I think there already is one (Lemoa) but when I tried a few months back it was very new and lacking features. Voyager has been so good to me, even if it is not native.
Just in time! I’m finishing my first year of uni this week, and just added a GTK or Qt app to my TODO list for the summer. While I found myself preferring Qt over GTK, I will still save this post and hopefully come back to you in a few weeks. Cheers,
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