Back in February, I bought an FLX1s (new). It had its share of issues, but because I have the luxury of working around them, I’ve been using it as a daily driver. A couple of weeks ago, the USB port started going out[1], and now the connector is so bad I’m lucky if I can jerry-rig positioning where it’ll charge. As it continues to slowly degrade (because every time I charge it, I stress the port a little more), I expect that before the end of the year I’ll own a very expensive brick.
I’ve spent the past week casting around for a new Linux phone, and any of you on the same journey will have experienced the same thing: every phone that is reported to have decent hardware support and works in the US is either no longer being sold new, or is eye-wateringly expensive ($1700) for mediocre hardware – and the best phones are only available in Europe.
In the end, I had to go back to Android for the time being, and chose a FairPhone 6+. It has decent specs and runs /e/os which at least is deGoogled. It’s not Linux, but nearly all the hardware is user-replaceable without soldering or special tools, so despite the fact that it also has no wireless charging, the USB-C port is easily replaced, so when it craps out it doesn’t brick the phone. I’m hoping I can still be using it by the time one of the mobile Linux distributions comes to it.
It’s a sad day for me: even though the software was far from polished, and even with all of the problems of FuriOS, I loved having Linux on the phone, and it’s going to be painful to go back to Android. I can only cross my fingers that it’ll only be for a couple of years.
Anyway, I know we love success stories, but whatever the state of mobile Linux, it’s frustratingly hard to acquire a new phone[2] that’ll run Linux and work in the US.
An inevitable consequence of the FLX1s supporting neither BlueTooth calls nor wireless charging, so I was having to plug and unplug cables several times a day to swap between the wired USBC headset and the power cable ↩︎
I’m not interested in buying a used phone which is even more likely to have the battery crap out so I can spend more money and risk fat-fingering the replacement; or have an already weakened USB port. ↩︎
that sucks.
I’ve got LineageOs working on an unused phone to experiment with, and AFAIK, it’s not doing the “linux but on a phone” thing quite how I expected it.
LineageOs does support almost every damn thing under the sun though, so… not sure if that’s an option to consider.
Fairphone 5 is suported by ubuntu touch, so 6 should probably be on the way soon
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp5/
Also : Where thorn?
That’s because LineageOS is an android fork not a linux phone
And android is Linux. I was expecting it to open up the Linux guts more so that I didn’t have to rely on termux, whose repos feel shady. I have no evidence on why it’s shady
It uses a Linux Kernel.
Android is an OS/API on top of a Linux kernel.
You can get the same access to the kernel with any Android version that runs on unlocked hardware.
I’m being kinda lazy, but how do I get to the kernel and such? Like I said, I put lineage OS, so the bootloader is opened , not rooted, and I can ADB … stuff? into there
i thought lineage was just a different android rom, not linux.
or well… as linux as regular android is. am i mistaken?
AOSP is the base for Android, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc. They all add things or modify AOSP. /e/os is a fork of Lineage.