[dogma1138]

Linux high end phones will never be a reality, at least not what people here would consider Linux at best you’ll get is Android or Android like OS.

Other than that you’ll get low volume low end devices at high end or higher prices due to lack of economy of scale.

What most consumers actually want and I’ll put in that list also many many people that say they want a “Linux Phone” but in reality will go back to their iPhone/Android after a week is quite different than what a tiny niche is willing and capable of dealing with.

[windsurfer]

I'm currently using an Fxtec Pro1 [1], which has a respectable Snapdragon 835 and 6GB of ram. It was released last year with an older processor but compare the Geekbench scores to the "High end" new Pixel 5 [2]. It unofficially supports quite a few distributions of Linux including Ubports Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, and LineageOS. Official support for Ubuntu Touch and LineageOS is coming next month. It's a niche device for sure but it exists, is being manufactured, and is available for purchase.

[1]: https://fxtec.com/

[2]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4573446?baselin...

[larntz]

This looks very interesting! Headphone jack and everything!

I have an Pixel2 and was thinking I'd get an iPhone next, but I'm really turned off by Apple's behaviour lately. I also don't want to send more money to Google.

I'm willing to accept that it may not be as polished as the big players, but how would you say it compares to other high-end Android phones?

And if you've tried running linux on it is it usable with reliable call quality?

[windsurfer]

I have been using the device with my own build of LineageOS 16.0. It's an Android-Linux OS but it has a custom Linux kernel where I have been customizing the keyboard driver. There are a few blobs in there but it's not too bad. Reception and sound quality have been totally fine with no complaints.

[RonanTheGrey]

Whoa. This looks exactly like what I've been looking for.

Taking a serious look

[heavyset_go]

I've been keeping an eye on this for a while now. Is the battery user replaceable?

[Silhouette]

Usually I'm a sceptic about Linux taking over the world, but this is actually the one situation where I could believe substantial progress might be made. If someone developed a slick UI for the basic phone functionality and a genuinely open Linux-based platform, provided compatibility with the major APIs needed to write Android apps so portability was easy, and maybe even funded the whole thing using an app store that took a fraction of the cut that Google and Apple demand, I could see that sort of model gaining enough traction to be viable.

Unlike on the desktop, most important phone apps aren't so large and complicated that they couldn't be ported to or reimplemented on a new platform with a realistic amount of effort. You could offer a significantly better developer experience than either of the dominant platforms today, which would be essential to supporting the apps users expect to find available on any mobile platform today but also potentially attracting some unique and better apps over the longer term.

From the user's side, they'd be genuinely in control of their own device. There could be real security, stability and privacy benefits as a result, and you could do away with a lot of the things that annoy users of current mobile platforms.

As ever, the problem is how to bootstrap a two-sided market. It would probably have to be extremely easy for developers to port their existing Android apps. You might also have to convince one of the major phone manufacturers who can make good hardware at competitive prices to support your platform as an option, or possibly make it easy to install it as a replacement on existing phones. But with the right promotional strategy even these things don't seem totally out of the question. It's a huge potential market, on a scale where one or more well-capitalised big players in the industry could potentially take an interest.

[bashinator]

Didn’t Canonical try to do something like this?

[nitrogen]

It sounds a lot like Nokia's Maemo, which was doomed by a lack of investment, subsequent renaming to ugly-sounding names, and bouncing back and forth between orgs after Microsoft's agent provocateur sabotaged Nokia's phone division.

[pjmlp]

Correction, Nokia board did that to themselves after hiring Elop and having a contract that would give him a nice bonus if he managed to do what he naturally end up doing.

As much as FOSS crowd loves to hate Microsoft, better get the facts right.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stephen-elop-to-get-25-5m-f...

[dogma1138]

At that point what’s the difference between this and Android, unlock your bootloader, download AOSP and hack away...

[cle]

For me a big difference would be not sending my data to Google. Even Lineage OS still sends a bunch of data to Google all the time. If you’re not careful it sends location data, DNS queries, etc.

I want a mobile OS that gives me complete control over my personal data.

[dogma1138]

AOSP.

[Silhouette]

At that point what’s the difference between this and Android

How many major phones can you buy with AOSP installed by default today?

How much development gets done on AOSP that isn't at least heavily influenced by the direction Google takes?

Does AOSP provide comprehensive privacy and security options for users but still freely connect with other devices and services using open standards?

Obviously if you're going to be Linux-based and if we're assuming some degree of compatibility with Android APIs to make porting apps easy then there is going to be common ground with AOSP, but I don't think that makes it the only or necessarily the best option.

[dogma1138]

But that’s just the issue we already have most of this freedom available yet hardly anyone takes advantage of it.

Heck how many people do you think install SailFish on their phones? You can buy pretty decent Android phones with AOSP and even SailFishOS builds yet people aren’t taking advantage of that in any particular manner.

If almost no one uses it, even amongst those who claim they want that freedom why will build a business model around it?

[nitrogen]

What I want is a Maemo-based phone, with at least 20% marketshare and an Android compat layer so there is an ecosystem to support it, and the same camera as any other flagship level phone.

[dogma1138]

Well you can buy an Xperia 10 which whilst isn’t a super high end phone is still pretty decent and it runs SailFishOS... but then again you can probably count the number of people that did that on your fingers.

The issue is that whilst people want it there is never a good enough “reason” for that other than I want it, Maemo doesn’t give you more freedom than what AOSP does already at least not on the software level, you can degoogle and Android phone completely and do w/e you want with it. However people don’t seem to be doing that, and those who do often do that for academic purposes rather than to have their own personalized daily driver.

Even more so often the wishes of many people when it comes to customization doesn’t even require a rooted phone and a customized AOSP ROM, if you look at what people customize on their desktop which is often limited to their desktop environment and their workflow can be done on stock Android using alternative launchers and other apps.

Wanting for an Android competitor for the sake of having competition is fine, but it won’t look much different or it won’t be much of a competitor.

[nitrogen]

The problem I see is that distributed collective action, like a bunch of people all choosing to support one contender against the duopoly, isn't achievable by the open source ecosystem. It's fragmentary by design and by personality. So there are a lot of things you "can" do, but no turn-key solution I can buy from a store or download from GitLab.

The other problem is that you have to choose between hardware quality and customization, because hardware is locked down and there isn't enough economic air left in the room for a third player to be able to invest enough to compete.

As for not looking much different from Android, the key difference would be where the control lies, and what the mindset is around control. You should have a robust code signing and containerization/permissions system, but those should be in the hands of users. With Android every single app installs with permission to portscan every network you connect it to. You will have an app store, but the user will come first, not the ad network.

[Tor3]

Been using a Sailfish phone as my personal phone for years - it runs the particular Android apps I'm interested in, and works nicely as a phone for the rest. If the battery finally wear out on this one I'll go for an Xperia I think.

[heavyset_go]

Maemo was great, and so was WebOS in the Pre days.

App distribution was also better on both platforms. Maemo used apt under the hood, and Preware[1] was phenomenal. These days the two vendors that own 99.4% of the mobile OS market[2] don't want to let you install apps unless they can get a 30% cut.

[1] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

[megablast]

> don't want to let you install apps unless they can get a 30% cut.

They both allow free apps.

[heavyset_go]

Depends on your definition of free. GPL apps are banned in Apple's App Store.

[Mediterraneo10]

> What I want is a Maemo-based phone.

I liked my Nokia N900 and kept up for a while with attempts to keep its Maemo going after Nokia abandoned it. However, a decade later Maemo has bitrotted and its dev community has dwindled away. Nowadays the Phosh interface (i.e. the Librem phone, or Mobian running on the PinePhone) is seen as the most promising Free Software choice in the long term. Sailfish OS is also actively maintained, but its UI layer is closed source.

[t0astbread]

I guess what people want when they say they want a "Linux phone" is a phone that allows them to hack, mix and match their system the way they can on a desktop Linux system.

[dogma1138]

They can do that with many Android phones it’s not hard to find ones with a boot loader you can open including the Google Pixel.

I used Android from day one till the LG Nexus and I switched to an iPhone after having to spend yet another weekend compiling a kernel to update my phone.

Most people want a device that “just works”.

Overall I would be good money on the fact that the percentage of people that say they want to be able to hack their phone freely and will actually do so is very slim because again Android gives you 90% if not more of that freedom already and some devices even can boot other OSes.

Sure things like the blobs on the baseband are still closed but that will always be the case no one realistically is expecting a high end 100% open source phone, and if you are keep dreaming.

And yes while having a phone that just works and one that is open isn’t mutually exclusive in principal but it is in practice especially once you account for economics.

Like it or not securing an open system is harder, and companies don’t like investing time and money developing features hardly anyone will use.

[t0astbread]

Well, you're right, Android does offer more extensibility than people give it credit for: If you're okay with its heavyweight development tools you can (for example) write a custom launcher to change some of the UI and you can extend/intercept some system functionality with apps. There's also Termux which offers a Linux shell environment based on the underlying kernel combined with APIs for Android-specific functionality. It's actually quite powerful, you can run scripts or daemons in the background without a problem.

But what I mean is most of the system isn't really open like that. Configuration, application data and stuff like that is mostly managed by the system and you can't access or change that data without major hacks. Termux feels like a second-class citizen because most of the ecosystem isn't built with something like it in mind (in contrast to the "CLI-by-default" experience on other Linux systems). There's also a few (non-embedded) system components like the backup system (which, if I'm not mistaken, is provided by the Google Services Framework) which you can't easily replace.

Of course, when it comes to security this is not something you should give to anyone who doesn't know to protect themselves using it. And I assume it wouldn't be a financial success either, I just guessed this is what people mean when they say they don't like Android because it's too restrictive.

[brnt]

I've been using LineageOS for some years now, on 5 phones so far, and it has been, apart from initial installation, 'just works'. It auto updates, I never have to compile anything, I wouldn't know how to.