When I have read anything Android phone related on Lemmy, I often see comments talking about how they switch to Linux phone or tell people to swap Android with Linux ASAP.

What’s the general experience like using Linux as your phone and is it any good? I remember watching video couple years about it and hearing about it and the lack of apps (at least that is made for mobile in mind) and wonder if that has changed or is it just good enough.

  • cevn@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    I had a pine phone for a while and it was sufficiently developed to use it as a daily driver… if you could put up with dropped calls, and texts, and burning thru ur whole battery in one hour cuz sleep didn’t work.

    • prichter@lemmy.ml
      2·
      26 days ago

      I also have tried mobian on a PinePhone some years ago. The short batery live was indeed a big issue.

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    I put PostmarketOS on a spare device recently. PostmarketOS describes itself as currently being in a state suitable for Linux enthusiasts to try out, not for wider use. That seems about right to me.

    On the fun side, it’s proper desktop-style Linux. I can SSH to it from my laptop. I can compile software on it. I can run programs that have no business running on a phone. On the not so fun side, the cameras barely work, data over USB doesn’t work at all, and battery life is not good. Desktop Firefox on a phone screen is pretty bad. Rumor has it there’s some support for Android apps, but I’ve been looking at Waydroid’s splash screen for a long time now with no progress.

    • edinbruh@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I would like to interject for a moment. This statement is technically true but disingenuous and facetious.

      While it’s true that Linux is just the kernel, what most people refer to as Linux is actually the Operating System GNU/Linux, or, as RMS would now call it, GNU plus Linux, or sometimes, a less GNU depended, but mostly GNU/Linux compatible OS, or, as I have literally just now come to call it */Linux.

      Moreover, a modern */Linux system is expected to be based on SystemD, unless explicitly avoiding it due to some technical constraint or some desired feature of another init system. One could come to call this SystemD/Linux.

      And lastly, this kind of use case would be the perfect match for a Wayland shell, as opposed to an X11 shell. Which would be more efficient, and would give the shell more freedom in the management of windows.

      As a result, when asking about a Linux phone, we could expect one is talking about a phone running a SystemD+Wayland/Linux OS, or at least a mobile-focused */Linux OS.

      The Android kernel is a, largely downstream, fork of the Linux kernel, but the Android OS is in almost no way compatible with any */Linux OS, and it’s instead its own completely different OS.