Comment by GranPC
1 year ago
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.
Interesting history! "Motorola became the first company to use Linux on a mobile phone when it released the Motorola A760 to the Chinese market on February 16, 2003." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MontaVista#Mobile_phones
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.
I've never heard of BankID in Finland - perhaps the common name is something else?
4 replies →
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. ;-)
Right, used 2 of them as my primary phone between 2015 and 2024 when the hardware broke not many weeks ago. Just recently ordered their new one, which is a bit cheaper than this Furi. Admittedly a risk purchase because not much is known about it yet.
Also typing this on the ultra-cheap hardware made for the Indian market nearly a decade ago. Well, admittedly they have already announced to discontinue support and I never dared to carry it as my primary phone.
Now the last weeks I was forced to use Android as my primary phone. Really a suprise what crappy piecemeal Android is compared to SailfishOS made by a tiny company struggling economically forever.
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?
Meta also threatened app makers to start a lawsuit. Whatsapp Plus, Whatsup and Mitakuuluu people stopped on that threat. I don't see a reason why Meta would change their stance on this.
There is now a law from the EU, I think it is the DMA, which could change things for people living in the EU regarding interoperability. I haven't read anything about practical follow-ups yet.
By the way, only releasing source code as a blueprint might be fine, that happened before. I might remember it wrong, but it might be lame, the mp3 encoder.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've been using WhatsApp since ~2010, mostly the official client but with bouts of unofficial client usage, and I've never been banned.
Probably not very detectable for Meta since it uses a wrapped webview, but I've been using ZapZap on Linux for a good while now and I haven't seen a ban yet.
2 replies →
Has a well-behaved third party client ever been an issue?. A third party client that does things like retain deleted messages, report that read receipts are enabled but never actually sends them or other 'anti-social' behaviors is definitely asking to get banned.
1 reply →
> 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?
Possibly the OnePlus 6? This isn't an area I'm too well versed on though
1 reply →