Don’t say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don’t want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that’s a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don’t care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
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All it is needed is to have at least equivalents of basic apps from F-Droid and we’re getting there.
Propietary apps for accessing one smart toilet seat brand or some trash locked down social platform should be abandoned anyway.
What to you think about proprietary apps for accessing a bank account?
I kinda need these. Otherwise I’d have to carry two phones and I don’t want to do that.
They shouldn’t be used, not on Android, not on the web, not on Linux. We should not show companies, banks and our goverment that we are capable of giving up our freedom for some convience.
Maybe if I’ll be doing buissness and need to do multiple money transfers a day I’ll be using their web apps on a computer, but as I am individual person, I give friends cash and pay online via other methods.
That’s your choice. But you can make the same argument about using the Internet in general. Or any device that runs any proprietary, non-user-modifyable code.
You’d have to be able to run Android apps.
I was thinking I would just run android apps.
I have a feeling those budget phones around that price are sold at a loss and gain the money from selling user data. So I doubt it’d get down to that price
Probably not what you meant, but you can buy a Nexus 5x on eBay for $200 and flash Ubuntu’s mobile is to it.
Yes, no, maybe, depending on what exactly you mean.
- A phone that is comparable in specs to a similarly priced Android and runs native Linux without tricks: This is not going to happen ever.
- An Android phone that can be hacked into running Linux with tricks: Yeah, that exists, but it’s DIY. There are a lot of cheap phones that you can e.g. install PostmarketOS on.
- A phone that runs native Linux without tricks for that price point: Yeah, that’s called a Pinephone, and it’s pretty much that.
There are two main issues, why a Linux phone with good specs and without tricks and with full, real Linux is impossible:
- Linux phones got a tiny market share and due to the natural monopoly of operating systems and app stores, that’s not gonna change any time soon.
- SoC manufacturers have a different way of working than PC part manufacturers. For example, they won’t upgrade the Linux kernel/drivers necessary. Because of that, my phone (Fairphone 4), which came out in 2021 and runs Android 12 still uses the 4.19.157 kernel, even though 4.19 came out in 2018. And even of the 4.19 version, the newest revision is 228, and I’m still running 157. They didn’t even bother upgrading the revision number. Stuff like that doesn’t fly on decent native Linux. And SoC manufacturers will not support newer kernels if it’s only for <3% of the market share or some miniscule number like that.
Seems like Android which supports a broad range of Terminal commands is the best next thing.
If you want just an user-land mostly-compatible system, that’s pretty much it.
You can use Termux which proots if you don’t have root.
If you have root, you can use something like Linuxdeploy (which is seriously outdated, but if you know what you do, you can update the Linux installation in there). This gives you a chroot-based Linux with shell and GUI over VNC and root. It’s able to play almost everything you want.
On my installation (Ubuntu 22.04 with XFCE) I even got FEX to work, which allows me to run x86/x64 Linux programs. Then I installed x64 Wine and now I can run Windows x64 apps on my phone.
I think that I would be a close to ideal candidate for a Linux phone, because I use my phone for so few things.
That being said, the few things I do use it for are absolutely essential for me, as in I must have them to function throughout the day, and I am not interested in having multiple devices I need to carry to do them. Those are as follows:
- A quality OSM map/nav app.
- A Discord app.
- A Matrix client and an XMPP app.
- A fast browser.
- A quality media player.
Most those have something on a Linux phone, but they are either slow, buggy, of missing features, at least as far as I know.
There are other issues too though, so far Linux phones seem to be slow and buggy from the reviews I’ve seen.
But the ecosystem is a bigger issue. One of the nice things about being on an unlocked android phone running GraphenOS or Lineage is that you not only have access to most of the official Android app ecosystem, but also to the thousands of apps in the unofficial fdroid ecosystem and naked APK ecosystem.
So you get overall so much more than just Android, which is already a lot.
Switching to a Linux phone severely limits you on that ecosystem, because many desktop Linux apps won’t run at all on a Linux phone OS.
Another user here pointed out the similarity to Microsoft’s Windows phones that they tried to enter the market with years ago.
I had two of them, and honestly, I absolutely loved them. The hardware was sleek and powerful, everything that made Windows 8 suck on desktop was actually awesome on mobile. The only issue was, MS didn’t deliver on the app ecosystem. There were a few dozen popular apps that were ported over from Android, and many of those were buggy or had limited features. That killed the phones hardcore. Who wants to use a phone that looks nice and runs fast, but only has a few apps that you need?
Would you buy a super powerful and sexy gaming computer that could only play 10-20% of your game library?
Personally, I would prefer to see the teams that are developing Linux phone OSes stop working on those projects and switch over to fully custom and FOSS Android versions. Similar to what we have now with different companies’ Android versions. But instead of the main differences being icon themes and bloatware, make them more varied like distros.
KDE Android, Ubuntu Android, Arch Droid, etc.
Have them focus on making their Android distros fast and feature-full. People could then have android powered tablets and car consoles that are compatible with Linux and other unofficial versions of Android.
I would love to have a KDE Android phone that is 100% integrated with a custom KDE Android car console. It would be a FOSS version of Android Auto. Imagine being able to remotely transfer files from my Linux PC to my car, both running KDE connect. Syncing them together to update my OSM custom maps. I could install Finamp on my car’s console and stream my Jellyfin music to it while navigating using Magic Earth or OSMand on a nice big screen.
I can keep dreaming…
PinePhone is $150. The more appealing option long term will be getting Linux running well on old Android phones though, as they are available used for $100 or less and have better specs. Often better specs than even the $400 PinePhone Pro, which is the most powerful designed-for-Linux phone I know of.
I’m typing this on a OnePlus 6T running postmarketOS. I paid somewhere around $125 for this phone, with box and accessories and in very good condition. It has an 8 core processor, 6GB RAM, Vulkan-capable Adreno 630 GPU, better WiFi/Bluetooth than either PinePhone, much better battery life, and a very nice OLED screen.
It’s not all perfect yet though. It doesn’t support VoLTE yet in Linux, so you have to force 2G mode to be able to receive calls and texts. Call audio is sometimes missing. No camera support. No USB host mode support. Sensors are WIP, but I’m testing the merge request for them and rotation works.
I ran a PinePhone and then a Pro for a year each. I think I prefer the OnePlus 6T experience. If they get the modem issue figured out it will be an amazing option.
Your expectations around price are unrealistic unfortunately.
And you can use a terminal with stock Android. Although you’ll probably need to root it to do anything useful.
Note: Linux phones are notoriously insecure (source)
yeah, now I am not buying it lol. I wanted a daily driver not a phone for some habit :(
Note: Linux phones are notoriously insecure (source) but please correct me if you know better
A few points
Operating systems like Android and ChromeOS have full system mandatory access control, every process from the init process is strictly confined.
Android uses SELinux for mandatory access control as per their own docs
As part of the Android security model, Android uses Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce mandatory access control (MAC) over all processes, even processes running with root/superuser privileges (Linux capabilities)
As for ChromeOS, it’s built upon Linux and that blurred line between Chrome and Linux is being completely removed –> hello Linux And ChromeOS aka LACROS
To make matters worse, some system daemons are not designed with permission control in mind at all. For example, PulseAudio does not have any concept of audio in or out permission.
PulseAudio is due to be replaced by PipeWire which
was designed with a powerful security model that makes interacting with audio and video devices from containerized applications easy.
https://github.com/mikeroyal/PipeWire-Guide
There’s also Wayland, which is being written to replace X11. It has better security
Wayland isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both.
While it’s true that many apps aren’t designed with security in mind, flatpak and snap packages have their portals API. The author did mention that they are underutilized, but that’s slowly changing.
Additionally, immutable distros (nixOS, Fedora silverblue) do exist, which make it quite hard for unauthorised applications to modify root partitions since they are mounted as read-only. Mobile NixOS is still in its infancy, but it’s being worked on.
In conclusion, security on linux isn’t hopeless, there are solutions being worked on, and improvements in linux phones will benefit all desktop users, unlike distros like Android and ChromeOS that build custom solutions that aren’t contributed back to the community.
But how much software is ARM compatible though? Since Android is also free and open source (Google apps are closed and has closed aspects), I don’t see Linux phone ever being cheaper than they would otherwise be running Android. A 200-400$ Android phone today is basically a year or two old or just garbage.
Honestly, I disagree about cheap android phones being shite. I have a redmi note 10 pro and it genuinly is a very impressive phone especially for the money. I bought it new when it came out and it wasn’t expensive at all.
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Pinephone is barely usable as is They need to ve functional first
The pinephone is cheap
RAM is pretty bad thought :(
3GB, everything else is upto the mark
Unless people pay for the hardware and software development to happen, Linux phones will never be as feature complete as Android or iPhones, so people will not buy as many, so the prices will not go down.
Also, I gotta disagree reeeeaaal hard with the sentiment in the comments here that Android is Linux since you can slap a terminal on it. Excuse me, but where’s the GNU?
Excuse me, but where’s the GNU?
