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.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    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…