Comment by jchw
1 year ago
Apparently it is based on Halium, so it's probably not going to run mainline Linux any time soon. On the other hand, I'm less happy with Android than I pretty much ever have been, so having some more options outside of relatively unusable Linux phones and being stuck with modified Android firmware certainly does not hurt.
I am definitely interested, especially if the team working on it is as active as it seems they are. Definitely one of the biggest bummers with PinePhone and PinePhone Pro was realizing that the community was largely on its own; that could work well, but in practice progress has been slow and painful and I stopped paying attention.
I would really like to see more projects doing cellular Linux devices in general. It doesn't need to be a candybar smartphone, if someone can jam a cellular modem into a MicroPC I'm sold at any price I can afford.
I work on this device. We are currently QAing the latest update with our community, which contains a lot of goodies and improvements shaped directly from community feedback. You can see previous changelogs at https://furilabs.com/changelog
I am obviously a little biased, but this is probably the first Linux phone that people can actually use. Someone in our community switched from iPhone to this without much of an issue.
Nokia N900 and N9 ran on Linux in 2009 and 2011.
N900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
N9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9
The Motorola A1600 ran Linux in 2008. But even then people didn't want a flip phone.
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My gripe with any of the open source phones is that id apps such as bankid don’t work without the secure token storage of Android. Is this Solvable?
You could always protect the signing certificates in the apps with derived passwords, still the length of passkeys practically acceptable to type in on a phone is too short to safely protect a certificate vs a bruteforce attack without some kind of HW assisted storage.
In the end it also boils down to what devices the BankID app providers are willing to support, I have a hard time seeing anything but iOS or Android devices being supported in the near future, Esp as Swedish BankID's now also requires NFC support to read the local police issued ID cards (had to get a new testing-device just due to this requirement).
Note: BankID is the name of personal identity apps that support authentication and signatures in Sweden, Norway and Finland, the authentication is used to access a myriad of both public and private sites like tax office, unemployment, healthcare and gyms. The signatures done via the apps are generally accepted to be of as good legal standing as a signed paper.
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The Sailfish OS phones are in some use, and they've been running full blown linux since 2013.
Using a Sailfish OS phone since 2013 - just saying. ;-)
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Since you guys are running Gnome, you might be interested in helping with (or funding) this native GTK WhatsApp client: https://github.com/tobagin/whakarere/
Since these days something like >90% of people is on WhatsApp, it’s beyond quintessential to have a good WhatsApp client.
My biggest hold-up with that sort of work is that Facebook has previously threatened to ban users who use third-party clients, and then they have gone through with the threat. Is this no longer the case?
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> this is probably the first Linux phone that people can actually use
I'm actually using GNU/Linux phones since 2008. Never relied on Halium.
Anyone tried running KDE?
Not on this device in particular, but I've seen it done in the Droidian community. Similar steps should work, although I heard it's a little janky.
Can i run my own gui like sxmo on it easily?
Easily probably not the word I'd use. Anything that runs on wlroots should be doable with not a lot of effort. Beyond that, tricky. sxmo doesn't use hardware acceleration though so not too bad.
I don't care about running stuff out of the box, but NixOs support would be awesome!
Does anyone have NixOS+Halium working?
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Halium is based on libhybris, to my understanding that was developed when Nokia stopped making Linux phones and some of their developers started making their own under the name Jolla/SaifishOS in 2011.
While Nokia could maintain their own Linux kernel that's impossible for a small vendor/team. There is no realistic alternative to taking the Android kernel provided by the SoC vendor.
Is there any phone that runs mainline Linux/upstream Debian, and is available to buy right now?
I'm sick of big companies who removed the word Consent from their dictionaries. I want something I can own and trust again. Being able to run android apps would be great, but given how closed source Android has become, I doubt that apps run on an open system would be reliable.
100% mainline - not really yet, but from those that are close to mainline and on which you can run Mobian (which is upstream Debian with a small repo overlay for stuff not ready to go into Debian proper yet) and that you can buy new right now are Librem 5, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro.
If second market also counts then there are a few more options available - mostly former Android phones where hardware support is spotty though, so do your research first. That said, everyone's needs are different and what's there can already fulfill the needs of plenty of people, so it's a matter of figuring out whether you in particular are in this group yet or not.
Thank you for this helpful explanation! Hopefully one of these three will be will be good enough for my needs.
I want to get one of these to play around with soon: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6T_(oneplus-fajit...
The SDM845 stuff looks quite promising for mainline but unfortunately the platform is definitely showing its age (and camera is still completely broken on every device as far as I know...)
Still, it's something!
Not true for the Poco F1 (although AFAIK you still need to build your own kernel on postmarketOS to enjoy this): https://fosstodon.org/@joelselvaraj/112621744555315631
Shift6mq is supposedly close, with OnePlus6(T) its more difficult due to I think the way the sensor is connected.
Currently, the Pixel 3a is the most promising device in terms of Camera Support on a Qualcomm device with mainline kernel from what I can gather.