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.