Comment by hellcow
5 months ago
The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
They’re selling it for the same price as the outgoing model despite tons of bullshit tariffs being levied against them. What an achievement!
I want a Linux phone that works, and I want to support a world where Linux phones exist and are financially viable to make, therefore I will buy this as my next phone.
My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.
I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.
postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.
If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.
And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.
I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.
> postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers
this is why halium exists. OEMs don't produce drivers beyond whatever kernel they ship with, so this is an attempt to build a system that leverages the crap they do ship.
> why stop at the OS?
Because the OS is the only thing you control. The reason the Librem 5 costs so much for a decade-old platform is because they didn't grab a predesigned device from another OEM. Doing everything yourself is going to be the only way to produce a first-class linux phone.
It uses halium and libhybris. Flatpak apps work perfectly fine on my FLX1. I have no usability issues with the phone at all.
you don't really need flatpak
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> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,
That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.
Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)
Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)
Github repo contributors are not hidden.
eg: https://github.com/FuriLabs/rootfs-templates/graphs/contribu...
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It is not nor should it be a showstopper. A functioning device that can be widely used helps build eg an app ecosystem. That part needs to exist and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hallium or not.
This isn’t an all or nothing situation.
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> Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?)
Go lurk in their Matrix chat. They've noted in there that they didn't exactly have a ton of choice in stuff like this because you don't really get a ton of options as a small operation.
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
My Librem 5's camera is fully functioning just fine. Many entries in that table are either outdated or pmOS-specific, or marked as "partial" because they require some tiny manual intervention that's not a big deal in practice.
The pictures I shoot on my Librem 5 look nothing like the (pretty good) ones that you regularly post to the Fediverse. My photos are just a faded, grey, blurred, grainy mess. I can take the time and manually set focus (autofocus never works) but the manual focus slider and button are so difficult to read that by the time I figure out whether or not the slider is enabled, the photo opportunity is long gone.
When I look at your photos, I often wonder what I might be doing differently than you. But after two years of daily driving my Librem 5, I decided to no longer care, and just stopped making photos altogether.
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>(in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else)
Nit: The Pine64 PinePhone's cameras at least have been fully functional since 2021. It's a very shitty pair of cameras, but they're definitely fully functional.
I know the wiki.postmarketos.org page for it says the camera support is "Partial" and that a bunch of drivers are out-of-tree. This and much of the rest of the page is extremely outdated, and I (maintainer) just haven't had the time to go through that page and fix it up.
I'm not a PostmarketOS user (I prefer Mobian), but thanks for maintaining the PmOS Pinephone port. It's thanks to people like you that real Linux distros on phones can continue to work and get better.
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all
From what I have been able to tell, the folks behind Furilabs are also behind Droidian, which is Halium/libhybrys based. Furilabs/FuriOS is the commercial version of it.
seems correct.
https://github.com/FuriLabs/rootfs-templates/blob/forky/furi...
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
I wish usb cameras were sold in the same form-factor as phone thermal cameras. Then the missing drivers for the built-in cameras wouldn't matter as much.
I doubt the market is nig enough, but I know at least a few people who I'm sure would buy a phone that was actually as thin as the new iPhone Mini pretends to be without the camera bump, then have a USB C camera attachment for the rare occasion they need to take a photo.
Not many people want to have to have an extra camera plugged into their phone because the built in ones don't work. HN sometimes...
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I think the crucial issue here is Android app compatibility. Desktop Linux programs aren't suited for use on mobile devices; the experience is inevitably poor. Android compatibility is claimed, but no information beyond that is provided. If this device does not run at the very least any app that does not depend on Google Play, e.g. apps from F-Droid, it's dead on arrival. In that case, you are much better off with a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Graphene is very polished and has 100% compatibility with Android. Everything just works and the user experience is as good as an official Android device, only free of Google spyware.
> If this device does not run at the very least any app that does not depend on Google Play, e.g. apps from F-Droid
It does.
I have an FLX1, a review sample.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
I had 3 app stores on mine: Amazon, F-Droid, and Aurora. Apps from all 3 worked.
"I think the crucial issue here is Android app compatibility ..."
I thought there was a robust android emulator for linux such that I could run android apps - and call an Uber or whatever - from desktop linux ...
Is that not so ?
>I thought there was a robust android emulator for linux such that I could run android apps - and call an Uber or whatever - from desktop linux ...
There are some but not really great and it will become impossible very soon with remote attestation and play integrity. Already Uber is one of the few apps that have the hardware attestation keys for grapheneos manually added.
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Yeah everything works except payment, and banking apps, and probably some other stuff. Considering Google's policy direction this isn't going to improve sadly
To be precise, there's an Android API called Play Integrity that defines a device's integrity. This integrity can be STRONG, DEVICE, BASIC, and no integrity.
GrapheneOS can only pass a check for BASIC integrity. It cannot pass a check for DEVICE or STRONG integrity.
STRONG integrity is hardware-backed (think TPM) and is not spoofable. DEVICE integrity can be spoofed and there are tools to do it, if you root your device, but Graphene does not want to this for various reasons. [1]
It is up to the developer of every app to choose to use this API or not, and to lock some or all of the features of their app behind this API.
GrapheneOS actually supports hardware integrity (the STRONG variant), but in a particular way. Every OS integrity API (including eg. Secure Boot) is based on a list of master keys, that are installed with every computer. Users that want to install custom operating system that are not signed by a major company will have to enroll their own keys into the Secure Boot system.
Hardware integrity also requires root keys, and those are owned by Google. But the API is actually general enough to allow both a "Verified" (signed by a root Google key) and "SelfSigned" custom keys. GrapheneOS provides a guide [2] that describes how to adapt the hardware integrity checks to accept either a Verified key or a SelfSigned key from a list of keys from GrapheneOS.
There is no reason why app developers should not accept operating systems signed by GrapheneOS just like those signed by Google, for the simple reason that it provides the exact same anti-tamper protection.
Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.
[1]: "they use fingerprinting techniques such as GPU fingerprinting and send along that data, which enables detecting and banning spoofing. It is NOT practical to pretend to pass these checks. It is only possible in the short term at a small scale. It will get banned and stop working."
[2]: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
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You can't use Google Pay obviously if the phone is de-Googled. That's a good thing IMO, the last thing I want is Google tracking how I spend my money. Carrying a credit card in a wallet case with my phone is a very minor inconvenience.
The Bank of America app runs on Graphene without issues however. So generally speaking it is not true that banking apps don't run on de-Googled phones. Here it is the developers that are to blame if they enforce compliance with Google's requirements and don't stick to the basic FOSS version of the OS.
My banking app works without any issues, but I do have google play enabled.
And let's be honest, it's not like there hasn't been spent a decade or more, with thousands of developers working tirelessly on making Android as good as it is today. Like linux laptops not burning up immediately is itself a change upstreamed from android development, but that's just half of the story.
A mobile OS fundamentally needs a different application model -- apps can't just decide to run whenever they like. How will desktop GIMP know that it shouldn't waste my battery when in the background (unless it very specially requests it throuhg an API made just for that)? Does suspending it work as you expect? For how long will you suspend it, shouldn't you kill it as well after a while? Who saves stuff?
I can't help but feel that anyone strongly advocating for a GNU Linux phone (because let's be honest, Android is the linux phone) is just not familiar with the actual context of what it entails.
No one is running gimp on their phone, besides for laughs. There are a number mobile-centric apps in the repos, stick to them and you'll be fine.
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It doesn't run Debian, it runs (a fork of) Droidian which relies on Android layer underneath. There are other Linux phones that do actually run Debian and don't rely on Android.
You are referring to postmaketOS for which the project leaders themselves claim there is no flagship device where everything works as expected?
No.
I don't know what they are referring to, I can't speak for them, but...
• postmarketOS is unrelated to Debian.
• postmarketOS is based on Alpine.
• FuriLabs does not use Alpine or postmarketOS.
• FuriOS is Droidian is a Debian derivative.
• FuriOS is Debian running on an Android kernel, with Android in a container you can stop and start on demand.
Nothing you claimed applies here.
I think seba_dos1 refers to PureOS [0] (for the Librem 5; PureOS is essentially a FSF-endorsed Debian) and Mobian [1]. Both use a close-to-mainline kernel, Mobian's goal is to "bring Debian to mobile devices. Over time, the idea is to minimize the Mobian specific pieces by “upstreaming” customization to the original projects."
[0]: https://pureos.net/
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/
True. This seems like an amazing device especially given the total B.S Google and Apple have been throwing at us. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it were available in my country.
Hear hear. I’m excited about this and may get one just to support the cause even though my iPhone 13 mini is still just fine.
I think just like "Made in the US," a lot of people say they want one, but most really don't, due to either price, hardware, and/or software drawbacks.
Many want one, fewer agree to afford.
It never was, it's VC news
>I want a Linux phone that works
That's Jolla C2 or some Sailfish-compatible Xperia 10.
Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.
> Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.
That's a hell of a hot take. Could you elaborate on why you think so?
Phone UI paradigm isn't as easy as "Let's just scale down the Desktop/Tablet applications". In case of Sailfish OS development history, migration from clunky, but closer to Desktop, Hildon framework of Maemo 5 to purpose-built Qt applications of Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan was obvious quality boost. Same with webOS and UBports: app ecosystem starting from scratch within their corresponding "DE"s. If convergence-style cross-device applications were somewhat easily achievable, that would've happened in the early 2010s (Windows Phone / Windows RT? Ubuntu Touch getting more attention from investors?). It's the same story why Android Tablets suck and iPadOS doesn't, but in other direction.
And/or, it's a simple matter of time/money being spent on streamlining the experience. It's not like Sailfish OS is perfect (Qt6 migration is way overdue), but Jolla has already figured out lots of integration details which will become teething problems for Droidian and such. Including, but not limited to VoLTE support.
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I somehow agree with this statement too. Although I don't dislike current GNOME, I think Mer Linux (SailfishOS and Nemo) as well as its predecesors (MeeGo and Maemo) are much more pleasant to use on a small screen. The others don't look very optimized for that usecase. Actually, MeeGo, as shipped in a Nokia N9, was in many aspects the most elegant mobile UI I've ever seen.
> Linux phone that actually works
Then why do all photos of this phone show the logo, not the actual OS it’s running? If it’s running something that is not Android, I would expect a page how the OS actually looks and works before considering it a serious, working alternative to Android.
> This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
"Shut up and take my mo... 170mm x 76 mm, 201g? Sigh - never mind!"
Sorry for adding one more awful comment. If they make a mini version, I will absolutely put my money where my mouth is.
I saw dang's comment of praise here for your post, which is meant to highlight "hackers" bringing something new to the market. Got it, but your post's comments of praise is vacuous if you don't own one and speak from first-hand knowledge. How can you praise it as a phone "that actually works" if you don't own one?
I'm glad for this release but I think users are cynical because of the state of things since the Pinephone and Purism releases. There had been what felt like very little progress towards a "daily driver" device. Mind you I think Sailfish has shown it's doable a long time, but this is cast aside for being paid.
> The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
It’s funny because excessive negativity is peak HN (see: Dropbox post) but yeah, it’s amazing how many people are focused on how this couldn’t/doesn’t work than got it could/does.
I bought 4 Firefox phones, am itching for hardware that I truly own in the age of AI, and I’m ready to be hurt again.
Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Edit: If you notice that this does not match with another comment I've made saying I wouldn't buy this because of the size, I can only offer as a defence that I'm also trying to vote with my wallet about the size of phones so I'm torn.
I think it's probably better on balance to have a small phone that does everything that it should perfectly, and live with the compromise of living with the walled garden, while still being small to easily hold and encourage me to go and use a more appropriate device than something I've pulled from my pocket for any task that requires staring at a screen.
> Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Good news, it’s not too late, I still have 2 FX0s and 2 others (jk but if you’re in Tokyo maybe not jk)
Also not sure I was doing God’s work, the second app (PWA) I made for FirefoxOS was a Tinder clone using their undocumented API
And definitely no problem with people not buying, not everyone is a first adopter and that’s fine (I’m not either).
That said a slightly too large phone is probably not a high price to pay for appreciably more freedom, just my 2c
The phone for Furries? Count my furry friends in!
Har har - from their FAQ[1]: Furi is pronounced “Fury”. FuriOS is pronounced “Furious”. We simply couldn’t afford the Fury part of the domain names.
1: https://furilabs.com/faq/
> Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world,
That is a vanishingly low bar, apparently. We don't need to praise something just because it is FOSS. With it's quite old hardware and limited software it instantly becomes unattractive for many.
That was always the challenge for computer phones, to get the phone part of the phone work. There's been many Wi-Fi only PDAs, non-calling data cards for those, non-calling but cellular-enabled ones, etc. before iOS/Android happened.
> The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
The contrarian dynamic strikes again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Your comment is a good example of a corrective post, and the upvotes are deserved, but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality. On the internet, everybody needs something to object to!
> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.
Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.
Sometimes it seems like half the comment sections (but probably more like 20% lol) have a "what is wrong with all of you" as the top-rated comment, and I have to scroll way down, 5 or 10 top-level comments, before I find an example that it was referring to. It seems to get more votes by dramatizing the "going against the mainstream", when really it is the mainstream. (Which is kinda sad, but not really the worst thing in world, probably a perennial part of human society ...)
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