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.

  1. 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 ↩︎

  2. 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. ↩︎

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    6·
    11 hours ago

    Maybe stupid question, but have you had a look at the broken USB port and made sure there isn’t just some lint in it and some cleaning might do?

    But it’s hard to do more than that. Sometimes it’s possible to solder in a new USB port but that requires tools and a good amount of skill. And I didn’t find any pictures of the PCB so not sure if that’s even possible with that phone.