PieFedI Bought a Linux Phone in 2026 - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeuvLg6_f-E
Sure, the year of the Linux Desktop might be around the corner, but what about the year of the Linux Phone!
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Vikthey’re using a fairphone 4, not a 6, but honestly I’m impressed things like calling and the camera seemed to work so seamlessly? I’m tempted to pick up one of these older android phones to poke around at. I think one of the mobile linux projects publishes a compatibility matrix somewhere.
I’d love to try a pinephone pro if they still produced them 😔
I have both pinephones and I don’t love either…
but I do love their e-ink notepad and SBCs and pinetime etc. basically everything, just not the phone.
Haha yeah I’ve heard that they aren’t great, though most of the input I’ve seen is focused on the original rather than the pro. suppose I may be better served with some older compatible android phone after all.
also happily using the pine time, along with the pinecil v2. I’ve thought about the e-ink display and I’m glad that’s serving you well.
EpicFailGuyThat’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time … I remember being all about the pinewatch one fore smart watches were a thing
Just watched this a little while ago and was pretty impressed overall.
I agree the “all open apps” view is awful. The Vista callout made me laugh out loud.
With this and Motorola working with Graphene, we seem to be moving steadily towards some decent options for phones that aren’t Google or Apple
Graphene still requires Android though.
The existence of Graphene obviously tells me that Android is a honeypot, otherwise a trillion dollar company like Google would also harden allocation and memory safety in Android.
I bought one way back in 2015. A BQ Aquaris E5, quite decent hardware, factory-installed with Ubuntu Touch. It was an absolute disaster: buggy as hell, even the most basic native apps (SMS etc) hardly worked. Obviously no way to run Android apps. Somehow I made it work for about 3 months before giving up and flashing a CyanogenMod ROM.
There was one silver lining. At one point during those 3 months I managed to lose the phone in a (completely anonymous) taxi. The interface was obviously so weird and crappy that the taxi driver actually replied to my SMS and returned the thing to me.
Any decade now it will be ready!
bufalo1973You do know those were only Chinese low budget phones rebranded in Spain, right?
Since I owned and used it for a year or two, yes, I did probably know one or two things about it. Better just to make your point if you have one to make.
bdonvrI have a OnePlus Nord N10 5G I picked up to play with Ubuntu Touch.
Now that VoLTE works I can actually make and receive calls which makes it nearly usable.
I wish RCS could work but that may be out of their hands. Group texts (MMS) don’t work either unfortunately.
It’s close to usable but still not ready for me personally.
I did contribute to Ubuntu Touch though by adding Colemak keyboard layout support and they accepted my pull request :D
LostWandererI really wish Sailfish would offer their OS for a wider range of devices, that OS seem the closest to ready for everyday people to use. Sailfish is great for power users as well!
thehatfoxUnfortunately many parts of Sailfish are proprietary though.
Yeah, but, given how they actually respect your privacy over something like Google…I am hard pressed to be overly concerned about it. Cautious, naturally because some code cannot be reviewed by the public or devs.
Is there a Fedora Touch or similar?
Sorta https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mobility
Mobile-specific distros like PostmarketOS function much better in general at the moment.
With the fact that Google is talking about controlling our devices, I am seriously considering going to a Linux phone even if it is a step down in user experience, just to give the middle finger to Google. I already run Lineage OS without Google Play Services, but I’m beginning to become afraid that they’re going to lock down AOSP to where you can’t install applications either.
Like sure, for now, it’s only going to be on devices with Google Play services. But what’s to stop Android 19 from being released and making it to where you can’t even do it on AOSP?
It’s not much choice if only iOS and Android are on offer, so it’s great to see alternatives that work. That being said, I’m considering a dumb phone and a small data-enabled Linux tablet.
How do you survive without Google services? Did you have to unlear / switch a lot of stuff? Like gmail?
Not OP but I like to share my experience.
I have never been entangled too much with Google, so getting away for me was more like choosing a different path from the beginning than finding my way back.
I use Posteo for my mails. It’s one Euro a month and comes with contacts and three free calendars I can sync using DAVx5. This works perfectly. I use CoMaps for navigation and a funny old TTS engine called eSpeak. It doesn’t have traffic yet, but the EU told all members to openly share all traffic information, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then, I drive without that information, which was perfectly fine until like 7 years ago. What else? Aurora Store to get a hand full of apps from the Play Store like Signal and Banking. That’s it. You just decide to live without it and do it.
I was pretty tangled in the Google ecosystem and so ended up switching to a lot of proton stuff such as proton mail primarily. I replaced Google Street Maps with OsmAnd and for getting addresses I use gps-coordinates.net to convert addresses like 123 Main Street, Washington, D.C., United States into GPS coordinates so that OSM can understand them better. I would still once in a great while bring up the Google Maps website to get directions for something, but found out recently that they stopped allowing you to get directions if you didn’t have the app, so was just looking at MapQuest. As of now, I haven’t had a Google account since January of 2023, and the only Google service I regularly interact with is YouTube through a third-party front-end called NewPipe. I try to find channels on other services such as PeerTube and have some success, but YouTube is the main anchor that still is a Google service that I interact with at all.
I use Geo Share to covert map links
I bought a Google pixel 10 and the first thing I did with it is install grapheneOS.
How comfortable is it to use graphene on a day to day basis? Considering getting a spare pixel. But that seems a hell of a lot more practical than a linux phone.
Motorola announced today a partnership with GrapehenOS. Soon, we will no longer need Google Pixel.
I’m not a heavy phone user, but I have GrapheneOS installed. I think it requires a bit of tech knowledge, but it’s cool.
I don’t mind the technical set up, I just wanna know if it’s a neutered experience or not
Will some Motorola phones come with Graphene preinstalled?
Generally there are no real problems. If you’re fine with mostly stock AOSP, you should be fine with GrapheneOS.
If you use Google Pay, you’re out of luck. There are alternatives for that depending on where you live though (mostly in Europe, in the US there’s no other option AFAIK). Rarely an app won’t work, but usually fiddling with some security settings for the app will fix it. Very rarely an app won’t work at all because (like Google Wallet) it uses Play Integrity and requires a level that requires Google to certify the OS.
Pretty much the only thing I miss is the ability to do NFC payments.
Is NFC gone entirely? Would yubikeys with nfc work?
They’d work. You might need to install play services for those, not totally sure (Google has shoved an annoying amount of functionality into play services). NFC itself is functional, but various apps that support NFC may not work because of Play Integrity.
I logged into my credit card app by holding the card to the NFC reader on graphene
I can’t say for GrapheneOS, but NFC still works on my Fairphone 6 with /e/OS without play services.
I can’t use NFC for payments, but I also can’t log in to my bank’s app without play services.
Keep in Mind that Ubuntu Touch isn’t the only Linux OS for the fairphone, via postmarketOS you can also use plasma mobile (kde), gnome mobile (GNOME duh) and others…
I’ve used the PinePhone, it was a fun geeky object to have. Most of my issues where related to the screen-size/format which most apps don’t handle well. Yes, apt/yay install <almost anything> does work… but you end up struggling to use it.
PostmarketOS with sxmo was the most usable.
Compared to GrapheneOS or /e/os, it’s day and night. You can’t compare apples and VHS tapes.
And to reply to your actual question.
GrapheneOS works perfectly fine for a daily driver.
It feels just like a regular phone to me. If I handed someone my phone they wouldn’t know it was GrapheneOS. The only thing they would fund weird is my launcher (KISS, which is certainly not for everyone) but that was something I installed myself.
One pain point is that my banking apps didn’t work out of the box. That was solved by checking an unassuming box in the individual app settings. For some banks it might still not work (mostly for countries that have security key devices, I believe).
I don’t have the adaptive battery charge feature that Pixels normally have, where it slows charging in certain conditions, to improve battery longevity. GrapheneOS’s version of this is just a simple option to stop charging at 80%.
Probably my camera is less good that stock Pixel, but I can’t tell. It seems fine to me
Google blocks my IP (refuses connections entirely), probably because theu dislike uBlock Origin.
What phone is this about?
It’s Ubuntu preinstalled on Fairphone 4.
How do they block your IP? What does YouTube say when you visit the site?
Nothing, they just refuse connection. I could use mobile data, but my home internet IP is blocked by them.
Blocking access for uBlock users seems like an unlikely thing to do. Are you using VPNs to circumvent blocks?
Nope.