Comment by Hamcha
5 months ago
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
I don't really need a cell phone, either.
> 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...
Thanks, my bad.
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.
I guess I might agree, so long as that ecosystem is shared with Purism Librem 5 (a potentially sustainable device, if not affordable), and so long as a more affordable but also sustainable device (which means non-Hallium) will actually appear in response to this ecosystem stimulus.
At all times during the ecosystem stimulus, someone has to be keeping an eye on the real goal. Which is getting those affordable, trustworthy, sustainable hardware devices to become available.
(I've seen Linux handheld/phone projects fail for ~25 years, wasted lots of time and money on them, and would be happy to see something solve the hard problem of open drivers.)
> 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.
I am taking photos with regular Millipixels from PureOS Byzantium like everyone else, without setting anything manually aside of triggering the autofocus sequence when necessary (in the latest version it can be triggered by simply tapping the preview; previously you had to cycle the "auto" button). The only thing that I do differently is how I turn the raw DNG file into a JPEG: see https://gitlab.com/dos1/glowup and https://source.puri.sm/-/snippets/1223
I think that's because Sebastian develops software for the Librem 5 and thus is likely not running a stock PureOS Byzantium.
I managed to get similar results in my holidays in late August(on postmarketOS 25.06 with Millipixels 0.23.0 and a patched kernel [1]).
Please note that I just used the Librem 5 as my "mainline Linux camera" and have not had a SIM in it in a while, and thus can't comment on how well postmarketOS 25.06 would work for daily driving.
[1]: Based on the APKBUILD in postmarketOS (https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob...) with https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/merge_requests/816.pa... added on top.
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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...
No: this would allow such cameras to be internally connected to a custom-built phone via USB, but without the connector, oor using a tiny connector. Think Framework laptop peripherals, only built-in
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