If you want a Linux phone that could be your daily driver, I would highly recommend the furiphone of furilabs (https://furilabs.com/).
I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...
It's an Android device with an old unsupported kernel that runs a hacked up Debian-ish userspace on top of Android layer. While that may be good enough for some, it's not what some of us want.
I'll stay with my Librem 5, which is also totally usable, runs actual Debian, runs Waydroid too, and does not bring me Halium pain.
I have been using an Altair 8800 as my daily driver for about 50 years now. It's really not a big deal to enter instructions through the switch panel, especially with good gloves, and it does basically everything I want it to.
Good for you, though I prefer my device to be reasonably capable for real world tasks and hassle-free while providing me the ability to run the latest software and to hack on it however I want. Otherwise I would stay on N900, as I still miss its keyboard.
20h battery life? Mine comes nowhere close to that with all hw switches off and only playing mp3's... Are you quoting a when suspended figure or something?
It can get up to 20h either when idle with all hw switches off or when suspended with the modem on (less with poor signal coverage, of course). Looking at a power meter right now I'd roughly expect at least 12h of music playback.
Check whether you get a high load average whenever Wi-Fi kill switch is off. If so, keeping it on and turning Wi-Fi off in software may give you better results. There are patches to fix that, but they need more work not to cause troubles with older cards (Redpine).
There was also another issue that may have caused interrupt storms when kill switches were set to off, but that has been already fixed recently.
There are some small power consumption improvements coming in kernel updates soon too, though these shouldn't make a drastic difference, just an extra hour or so.
Ouch. It seems to be even more incomplete than I thought. The lack of Bluetooth and GPS is kind of surprising, since those things have worked on Linux laptops for at least a couple of decades or so.
Then why haven't they updated their site to inform potential users? It would make me worry it's about to be an abandoned project. I've dealt with enough of those in my life.
>No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it.
For most people, it can be difficult to predict future scenarios for Bluetooth that's unrelated to wireless earphones. I always use wired earphones and didn't think I ever needed Bluetooth and always had it disabled. However, I was later forced to use it to configure new devices. E.g.:
- internet router (Eero) from ISP has no buttons or a status display so required Bluetooth on smartphone to configure it
- battery backup power station (Delta Ecoflow) require Bluetooth to configure them
The common theme is for device manufacturers to avoid adding elaborate LCD displays or touchscreen interfaces to the actual device and instead -- offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.
I'm just a single data point, but FWIW after the first week the only time I ever (literally) dust off my librem 5 is to show people what a joke of a phone I waited 4 years for. Purism had the right goals (mainline linux kernel, no run-time loadable closed sourced blobs, user-serviceable, hardware kill-switches) but the implementation is only worthy of a participation trophy. The phone would randomly drop calls (though I've heard this is finally fixed), the UI was terrible (UI elements rendered partially off-screen, a useless maps application that complained about a missing location service), the battery life is so terrible that carrying around a 2nd battery is common advice, and the hardware was anemic back when the phone was announced which made the difference even more noticeable when the phone finally came out half a decade later.
I'm glad I own the phone for the same reason that I regret not holding on to my G1 (the first android phone): Its a neat piece of history. But alas, it will never see use as an actual phone.
It works fine for me, I'm typing this on one right now. I'm still waiting for something that could replace it as it gets older, but I don't see anything viable out there yet.
The question is whether you're able to live without Android & iOS, perhaps with some limited help from Waydroid. If the answer is yes, as it is for me, then it's a great daily driver.
The lengths people go to for a horrible Ui/UX and app experience is bewildering. I guess they justify it by not caving into Google or Apple. Of course, all of their privacy concerns and safeguards go away when the credit cards, utilities and services they use all circumvent their precious Linux phone. But hey, at least you’re running Linux on your phone, right?
There is no alternative. Unless you pay by cash and have verified that all of the utilities and services you consume are not laundering your data then you’re just wasting your time by putting up with a horrible phone OS experience.
I don't use GNU/Linux on my phone for "privacy". It's an added benefit, but not the point.
I use it because it's familiar, hackable and respectful to my attention. It works the way I want it to work and it's capable enough to fulfill all my needs. Switching to Android would be a downgrade on all these aspects. I'm aware that it would be an upgrade in some other aspects that I care about less.
You are right to remind that other service providers such as banks or any online shop do routinely collect and sell an amount of personal data that should also concern us, but a phone in your pocket that is used for virtually everything and that's controlled by a third party raises more concern than just privacy of consumer data.
Jolla is really good. SFOS can even run lots of Android apps on an emulator, including banking apps, with zero issues. And the native ones are a delight to use, great indie apps. I wish they got funding from EU and became a completely open source alternative to the duopoly.
Have been running Sailfish OS on my primary phone since 2013 - works fine. Avoids a lot of the Android pitfalls, like being abble to easily SSH in and upload/backup data or total absence of advertizing anywhere. :)
> Your purchase includes a 12-month Sailfish OS full license subscription valued at €59.88 (€4.99/month), granting access to all releases, commercial components, and feature upgrades. After the first year, you can choose to continue your subscription and support Sailfish OS development further. Even without renewal, your device will continue to function, but future software updates and commercial component upgrades will not be available.
Just a note of something I came across when looking just now. Don’t mind paying for continued development but worth knowing before you buy.
Since the shop is super slow and intermittently giving a "Error establishing a database connection", for those having trouble: it's just above 600€ (base 550$ + VAT + shipping). At 17x8cm it's among the largest phones you can get, competing with e.g. the Ulefone 18T Ultra (the one with the FLIR camera, but Android). It has a headphone jack (big plus) but at that size, I just can't use that sadly. This glowing review really made me reconsider whether to see if a "real Linux" phone can work for me given how many years I've been using Linux desktops exclusively now
Indeed, on the bad side it is a little large (like the biggest iphone I guess but can still dit in a jean pocket), a little heavy, battery life average, and not perfect, like with the expectable rough edges that makes it a developer/tech enthousiast thing but not general public.
But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
> so your are forced to connect with your Google account
Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.
Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
It is not that you have to "interact" with Google the problem, in the sense of interacting like downloading an app. You can use the Aurora store, but once you try to use the app, the app itself will redirect you to an oauth2 login for your Google account, the kind that is associating your "phone"/Google service globally with your Google account. And this despite the fact that I will only use password login for openai and mistral, that should not be linked to Google anyway.
In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.
So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".
That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.
Aurora Store also runs a bunch of their own throwaway Google accounts you can use (the “anonymous” option on the sign-in screen). Usually works great, though sometimes takes a few tries to get a working account.
Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
sorry, my comment didn't convey my desired inflection. You don't need your google account. you just need a google account. As in, you can use a throw-away "google account". Or, one could, a year ago, at least.
I get that there's still a google profile on your usage of the device, and i'm sure they have a way to link it to your other profile(s).
I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...