Don’t say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don’t want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that’s a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don’t care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
I have a feeling those budget phones around that price are sold at a loss and gain the money from selling user data. So I doubt it’d get down to that price
Before the rise of Android and ios I’d have said it was possible, but the goal posts have shifted pretty far. Unless something backed by a corporate entity or government rises Up, it’s a no. A chromeos type thing for smartphone is not going to happen for mass market, because there is already Android.
Discounting Android, the last mile of what a smartphone is capable of can not be accomplished in Foss manner, without end to end verified OS images and some kind of secure enclave for banking and “security” features, carriers and banks are not going to get on board any more. Convenience features like DRM video streaming, casting also probably are not achievable either
True, with the goalposts. Nowadays we are happy if we can root/custom ROM and are still able to access our banking apps.
I went back to a pixel, as I couldn’t get my oneplus with lineageOS to do Android pay, after custom roms on all my phones since the HTC Dream, I have been running stock for the last 18 months, kind of miss it
There is a way to get it working, but it’s a pain and a half in the rear and you never know when they will kill the workaround.
Yes, no, maybe, depending on what exactly you mean.
- A phone that is comparable in specs to a similarly priced Android and runs native Linux without tricks: This is not going to happen ever.
- An Android phone that can be hacked into running Linux with tricks: Yeah, that exists, but it’s DIY. There are a lot of cheap phones that you can e.g. install PostmarketOS on.
- A phone that runs native Linux without tricks for that price point: Yeah, that’s called a Pinephone, and it’s pretty much that.
There are two main issues, why a Linux phone with good specs and without tricks and with full, real Linux is impossible:
- Linux phones got a tiny market share and due to the natural monopoly of operating systems and app stores, that’s not gonna change any time soon.
- SoC manufacturers have a different way of working than PC part manufacturers. For example, they won’t upgrade the Linux kernel/drivers necessary. Because of that, my phone (Fairphone 4), which came out in 2021 and runs Android 12 still uses the 4.19.157 kernel, even though 4.19 came out in 2018. And even of the 4.19 version, the newest revision is 228, and I’m still running 157. They didn’t even bother upgrading the revision number. Stuff like that doesn’t fly on decent native Linux. And SoC manufacturers will not support newer kernels if it’s only for <3% of the market share or some miniscule number like that.
Seems like Android which supports a broad range of Terminal commands is the best next thing.
If you want just an user-land mostly-compatible system, that’s pretty much it.
You can use Termux which proots if you don’t have root.
If you have root, you can use something like Linuxdeploy (which is seriously outdated, but if you know what you do, you can update the Linux installation in there). This gives you a chroot-based Linux with shell and GUI over VNC and root. It’s able to play almost everything you want.
On my installation (Ubuntu 22.04 with XFCE) I even got FEX to work, which allows me to run x86/x64 Linux programs. Then I installed x64 Wine and now I can run Windows x64 apps on my phone.
Do you think that might change with risc-v? As in, it would be more likely to have open source code and community support for kernel updates
I don’t think so, no.
What causes the situation currently is not ARM, but the companies making SoCs.
Currently, with RISC-V, we are seeing early-adopter trial runs by early-adopter companies. None of the usual suspects have any amount of serious skin in the game.
When Qualcomm is making mass-market high-performance RISC-V SoCs, they will treat them exactly the way they are treating their equivalent ARM SoCs right now.
Yeah good point, darn
Tbh, if we are unlucky, RISK-V might even get worse than ARM.
The point of RISK-V is to get rid of ARM ltd., the company that manages the ARM ISA and the reference designs, and asks for a lot of money from companies that want to use ARM.
RISK-V was made to have an ISA without such a middle man.
The issue here is that (apart from some university researchers) nobody makes freely available reference designs.
If a company wants to make their own high-performance ARM SoC, they call up ARM, pay a lot of money and get some directly usable reference designs. They maybe configure it with the features they want and then send the design to e.g. TSMC and they build it. Apart from a lot of money, not much else is necessary.
With RISC-V, there is no such instance where you can buy great reference designs from.
Instead, each company designs their own designs. Maybe some will sell their designs, but it might well be, that the top companies will just not share their designs, same as is the case currently with x64, where you can buy a ready-made AMD/Intel SoC and that’s it.
Yes. You have your pine phone. It’s more expensive than you’d like. But if if and only if enough people adopt it. Prices will come down with time
Since you don’t want anybody to tell you that Android is Linux, and you can do everything you want to do on Android with a custom ROM. I won’t mention it
Android with a custom ROM. I won’t mention it
do you know of any projects which has good support (and reputation) which has something like a terminal in it? I mean, I just want a terminal.
Also, I will be happy to spend 500USD on a Linux phone just to support it, but I wanted to know how far they are. Thank you for your comment.
custom ROM
I’m using CalyxOS on a Fairphone 4, works pretty well, appart from getting Playstore apps from Aurora Store without a Google account (I search for apps in firefox and open the link with Aurora which is clunky but works). You can install a terminal emultor from F-Droid, not sure why you would tbh but I’ve found several.
If you just want a terminal you can install termux from github right now. No need for a custom ROM. It will be fairly locked down but you can use almost all programs that there are for linux. I use yt-dlp in Termux to download youtube videos
I like you lol. btw, can I do stuff like control volume using Texmux? Like idk, switch on or off my wifi and turn off airplane mode and stuff
Pretty easily if you go a different route.
- Download something like the Terminal Emulator app. This gives you access to the CLI on any Android phone. Now you can already control some things over CLI, basically anything you can control without root.
- If you want more, root your phone. Now you can controll all of the things you mentioned from CLI
- Install a full Linux in a chroot (you can use LinuxDeploy for that, which is outdated, but that only means you need to update the Linux environment like a regular Linux). Inside of that, you can mount your Android system. Now you have a full Linux that can do all usual Linux things, and also control your phone. This Linux can be either accessed via shell (through Terminal Emulator app) or via VNC to view it’s GUI.
Now you have a full Linux inside Android that you can use as a full Linux, and that can control your phone from CLI.
If you are crazy enough, you might even get stuff like calling to work from inside Linux, but what’s the point? You still got a full Android to do Android things with it.
Linux in a chroot is so much real Linux, that I managed to get FEX (x86/x64 emulator) to work inside it, and Wine on top of FEX, so now I can even run Windows x86/x64 programs on my phone.
Termux API from FDroid?
Pine phone and Jolla/Sailfish are the only real ones out there.
Librem is a scam, they don’t have a real product. (Go watch Louis Rossman’s newest videos if you care).
Pine phone is… not exactly usable as a main phone. It’s very much beta. But it is a Linux device in the shape of a phone, and even though it’s incredibly basic hardware, it at least exists, it can be bought right now and some parts of it work.
Jolla have been doing their thing for a while. Afaik they don’t sell their own devices anymore, but you can flash their OS onto other phones, like e.g. the Fairphone 4. That kinda works in some regards, but at the moment e.g. mobile data just doesn’t work on that phone.
More to that here: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp4-sailfish-os-4-5-0-18-for-fairphone-4/97052
I think that I would be a close to ideal candidate for a Linux phone, because I use my phone for so few things.
That being said, the few things I do use it for are absolutely essential for me, as in I must have them to function throughout the day, and I am not interested in having multiple devices I need to carry to do them. Those are as follows:
- A quality OSM map/nav app.
- A Discord app.
- A Matrix client and an XMPP app.
- A fast browser.
- A quality media player.
Most those have something on a Linux phone, but they are either slow, buggy, of missing features, at least as far as I know.
There are other issues too though, so far Linux phones seem to be slow and buggy from the reviews I’ve seen.
But the ecosystem is a bigger issue. One of the nice things about being on an unlocked android phone running GraphenOS or Lineage is that you not only have access to most of the official Android app ecosystem, but also to the thousands of apps in the unofficial fdroid ecosystem and naked APK ecosystem.
So you get overall so much more than just Android, which is already a lot.
Switching to a Linux phone severely limits you on that ecosystem, because many desktop Linux apps won’t run at all on a Linux phone OS.
Another user here pointed out the similarity to Microsoft’s Windows phones that they tried to enter the market with years ago.
I had two of them, and honestly, I absolutely loved them. The hardware was sleek and powerful, everything that made Windows 8 suck on desktop was actually awesome on mobile. The only issue was, MS didn’t deliver on the app ecosystem. There were a few dozen popular apps that were ported over from Android, and many of those were buggy or had limited features. That killed the phones hardcore. Who wants to use a phone that looks nice and runs fast, but only has a few apps that you need?
Would you buy a super powerful and sexy gaming computer that could only play 10-20% of your game library?
Personally, I would prefer to see the teams that are developing Linux phone OSes stop working on those projects and switch over to fully custom and FOSS Android versions. Similar to what we have now with different companies’ Android versions. But instead of the main differences being icon themes and bloatware, make them more varied like distros.
KDE Android, Ubuntu Android, Arch Droid, etc.
Have them focus on making their Android distros fast and feature-full. People could then have android powered tablets and car consoles that are compatible with Linux and other unofficial versions of Android.
I would love to have a KDE Android phone that is 100% integrated with a custom KDE Android car console. It would be a FOSS version of Android Auto. Imagine being able to remotely transfer files from my Linux PC to my car, both running KDE connect. Syncing them together to update my OSM custom maps. I could install Finamp on my car’s console and stream my Jellyfin music to it while navigating using Magic Earth or OSMand on a nice big screen.
I can keep dreaming…
Linux phone plus android app support would do it
My phone runs Android, on which I run Linux in chroot, on which I run FEX, on which I run Wine x64.
That means I can run Android apps, Linux-ARM apps, Linux-x86/x64 apps and Windows x86/x64 apps.
Also I got Magic Dosbox running DOS and Win95.
And a bunch of emulators, namely C64, GB/C/A, DS, 3DS and Switch.
Yes, I might have a problem ;)
I love your problem.
Weirdly, it’s more fun for me to get a new system running than actually using it.
The only one of these systems that I really use a lot (apart from obviously native Android) is the Linux-ARM command line. Which is made much easier by the keyboard attachment I built myself (https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry).
This looks really cool. Perfect amount of nerdyness
Thanks!
