I probably can’t get a new phone super soon, but it’s been quite frustrating how little support there is for iOS versions of open source software I’ve been slowing moving towards or investigating. I absolutely get why though!
I have the capability to understand complex topics but it takes me quite a few tries to really get it, so I’d like some help or recommendations of things that aren’t “just use linux”. (I am slowly dipping my toes by using WSL for things, though.) I am always searching for software, but I’ve never been active enough in communities to ask for personal recommendations and be warned of short comings. Obviously if you find recommendations, they want to look the best to you and hide their faults. I do try and research as much as possible, but like I said, I can get confused or not understand the drawbacks or full level of manual work/environments needed to operate at times.
Mostly I’m looking for day to day things that I can operate from my windows computer, but can also connect to my phone, assuming I get an android next. (Librem phones looks cool, but switching carrier providers is not feasible for me at the moment.) The boring things, like calendar, email, notes (I do use obsidian already). But if you’d like to gush about your daily drivers, I’m all ears!
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Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Start with an android phone from a vendor that runs a very stock ROM. Go with Google for fast updates, teracube or fairphone for long term support and sustainability, or Nokia for a good solid privacy respecting company (not perfect, but pretty good). From there prefer open source play store apps. When you’re ready, try F-Droid.
Generally I recommend starting small and escalating
Second this. Start with a Pixel or a Fairphone and go from there. Pixels come with all the bits needed to build your own OS and so are supported by most aftermarket Android-based OSes. Using open source apps where possible is also a fairly significant part of the equation. The latest gen Pixels have 5-year official software support. Even if you stay on the stock OS, they won’t turn into e-waste too soon.
This is the best way. Messing with roms can be a lot of work and even if you want to transition to a more opensource ecosystem unfortunately in life youre going to sometimes need those closed source apps(like if you need to do banking stuff for example).
You can download fdroid and sideload all the open source apps you want and when you need to use a closed source you arent locked out of it.
That’s what I do. And yeah. If you use your phone for work stuff (email / MFA) there’s no chance in hell your IT manager is going to be okay with you having a rooted phone with a custom ROM with third party apps from an unverified source like F-Droid.
Unless you can afford to have two phones, one for work and one for personal, be ready to make some compromises
In my view, since I’m already switching to a different ecosystem from apple, I might as well pick the one I want in the end since I’m not really familiar with stock android in the first place. Tercube looks good, though it doesn’t support my carrier, hurm…
Yeah but to get to a special ROM you’re gonna need to familiarize yourself with a litany of other tools while your phone is still not familiar and usable. If you want to start out going super technical, more power to you, but for me I always need to take on new information slowly to keep from losing all daily productivity
That does make sense what you’re saying though. If I’m not in the best mental focus at the time it might not be best to delve too deeply into it. If I get maybe an older but compatible phone I can test without actually transferring my phone number over.
https://e.foundation/e-os/ can just buy these. Essentially LineageOS with some tweaks
Galaxy S9 is something like $100 on eBay and well supported
linux phones aren’t recommended currently for various reasons, they’re just pretty unstable and have various security flaws among other issues.
i’d recommend looking into a google pixel and installing GrapheneOS. its open source, and pretty much as good as it gets for privacy and security on a phone. it really is an excellent project.
very easy to set up and install, plus amazing app compatibility, no bloat or garbage, etc. its overall a really good experience, i can’t recommend it enough, had 0 issues with it.
either way, despite some of the other replies, i really would not recommend regular OEM android at all. android that comes with most devices out of the box is typically full of proprietary bloatware and spyware and other garbage that you can’t remove, and isn’t a great experience at all in general.
if you can’t get a pixel for GrapheneOS, next best thing is DivestOS, followed by LineageOS.
Oh I think I was misunderstanding linux phones vs alternate android OSes, I should have paid more attention to the terms. Yeah I had heard of some stock androids having ads in their UI and stuff like that which is insane. The pixel phones look quite affordable!
Just use android don’t waste your time with the ubuntu stuff. Graphene/Calyx are also good options if you want a privacy hardened android
I highly recommend Android. Just don’t install Google Play Services (use F-droid instead)
For that they’ll need to flash a custom degoogled ROM, so it would be necessary to get a phone that allow bootloader unlocking, and there’s a limited choice of smartphones with good community dev scene.
That’s good to know!
I’m just going to mirror a common sentiment. Get an Android phone and just use alternative apps that are open source.
I see you’re using Obsidian and I believe that Obsidian is not open source. I’d recommend Logseq as an alternative. I know it does not have as many features as Obsidian and it’s in beta, but it’s got a really nice community behind it.
Also I always recommend SyncThing everywhere I go. Sync your files directly between your devices. I sync files between my Windows PC, my Synology NAS, my phone, & my Linux laptop. It works like a charm.
Most FOSS Camera apps and photo galleries are not linked to an online photo service for example. So just sync them to your other devices directly instead of using the cloud.
Oh huh, I wonder why I thought obsidian was open source. I might have gotten crossed when I saw “offline + (actually) free + 3rd party plugins” and assumed something like that would be open source.
It’s freemium software that allows you to control your files how you want them which is honestly something that isn’t really common these days
Just use a stock Android and de-Google it as much as possible, there are Linux phone ROMs but they are… Well i wouldn’t recommend them for normal usage.
Oh interesting, why wouldn’t you recommend them for normal usage? I don’t use much on my phone, call/text, email, chat client, calendar is my normal usage.
Those Linux phones all run unstable and aren’t really in operativ condition, they are like a alpa version of a OS its usable but not worth the Overhead currently
That’s good to know there’s some opposite recommendations, means I need to research those more closely.
I Personally can’t recommend it, especially for new users.
Consider this option, see if it suits your current & future needs; https://www.fairphone.com/en/
I’ve played around with Ubuntu touch from ubports foundation on an old pixel 3a. It works ok as a basic daily driver. Depending on the phone model there’s support for waydroid which helps with using android apps.
I have an old Galaxy that I rooted recently for shits and giggles and couldn’t find much to do with it. I didn’t think of installing a Linux distro on it. Didn’t even know it was possible.
There’s a few projects out there to get Linux onto phones & make it a reasonable user experience. It will probably always be a very niche segment. Postmarket OS looks promising too but I haven’t been able to try it as my old pixel isn’t supported. Depending on your galaxy model it might be supported.
Fairphone is another one to watch. They make phones & you can pick the OS when ordering
I’d love to know this too if someone has any good suggestions.
I recently switched over from Outlook (which I found extremely annoying) to eM Client (not open-source unfortunately but free for 2 inboxes) which I like leagues better than Outlook. The only real open-source Outlook alternative (I know of) would be Thunderbird, if you haven’t found it already. Haven’t used it in a long while though. For Android I am using k9-Mail which is open-source but still pretty barebones. It’s from the same guys as Thunderbird, or rather k9 Mail was taken over by the Thunderbird guys. For my needs it’s perfectly fine but it can’t do anything besides mail.
I do actually ise thunderbird but it’s layout and interface is…lacking. Or not so friendly. As well as no iphone support, so still using gmail on the phone. There are plugins to thunderbird but are unstable so I uninstalled them and just only use it for mail now.
I had the same experience the last time I tried it unfortunately.
FairEmail is free software and I like it better than K9.
I’ll have to keep that in mind. The UI looks perfectly serviceable too.
