💾 Archived View for sud0nim.smol.pub › mobile-linux captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:37:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Early on when I started using linux in 2016 Purism announced their librem 5 phone. Like most people in the linux space, I was intrigued. Being 15 at the time, I wasn't ready to drop $400 on the initial preorder but it got me looking at mobile linux for the first time.
This is when I discovered that this was far from the first time linux on mobile had been attempted. There was Ubuntu touch and Sailfish OS which had preceded purism a few years prior, both of which are alive today but failed to reach a wide audience and only booted on a few devices. But more importantly they failed to be what I imagined as a linux phone; both prioritized the mobile interface over having access to the preexisting linux ecosystem. Sure desktop apps could somewhat run on Ubuntu touch with the libertine containers but describing that as buggy would be putting it lightly.
What I really wanted was desktop linux running on a phone. I didn't care about poor scaling and kludge interfaces if it meant having access to a large software catalog of desktop applications. First I tried running linux in a chroot on my android phone and accessing that through X forwarding or VNC. This didn't work well, The overhead of running the entire android system and a bare bones linux install proved to be too much for my phone, and even if it was fast enough the delay from needing to access the gui through VNC or X forwarding proved to be less than usable. Plus no sound but I'm sure I could have got it working.
Then I dropped my phone and completely destroyed my screen. I had a oneplus 3 and really loved the phone so I decided to just get a replacement screen, but when it was all installed I ran into a number of issues. For whatever reason the previous android install prior to the drop became unusably buggy and so I decided to look around for a new rom to install. Then I found that somebody had ported Sailfish OS to it! Finally here was my chance to ditch google all together! Sure enough Sailfish OS installed and ran great, it was a few updates behind but I was able to actually use the phone.
Sailfish's user interface with the swipe navigation was really ahead of its time. Google and apple have tried to capture the cohesive way each app responds to each gesture but failed. With the ability to add apps beyond the Jolla Store with the Mer project repos, I could do pretty much everything I needed a smartphone for. However it wasn't perfect, I was a screen obsessed teenager and always had a youtube video playing, something which sailfish was not great with. There was a youtube app but it sucked and lacked basic functionality and none of the browsers were particularly good, and struggled with playback. I made it work but I was eager to jump away from it when I could.
I had a bit of left over Christmas money and I was able to pick up a nexus 5 for pretty cheap so I could play around with Ubuntu touch, which supported the device. The install was painless and the overall user interface was quite nice. This is pretty much where my praise ends. Ubuntu touch lacked basic functionality. MMS didn't work and official apps regularly crashed or failed to start at all. After only a couple days I was ready to write off Ubuntu touch as not ready for my daily use and I ended up putting my sim back in my oneplus 3. I kept on using Ubuntu touch as a secondary phone because it did one thing amazingly well: web browsing. Their morph browser was second to none and I still think it's the best mobile browser I've ever used. Though this was quite good it did mean the majority of apps available on the store were lackluster web-apps.
After trying the best linux phone OSs on the market and being disappointed, I gave up on mobile linux for a couple years. Then the pinephone was announced. This seemed like a real game changer, targeting an easy to develop platform instead of trying to make android phones run linux made so much more sense. Purism showed itself to be pretty much a failure after raising the price a few times for the same shoddy hardware, though they did develop Phosh and should be appropriately lauded for that. The announcement had me excited for linux phones once again and since I had last tried them a new project had taken the spotlight: postmarketOS. I had heard of it when I was last trying mobile linux, but it was only barely booting on a few devices at that time. Now it was booting on at least 100 devices and had a number of officially supported devices. I looked at the list and found that the Moto G4 play was pretty cheap used so I ordered one up.
Now pmOS had a more traditional linux install to it, after all it was based on alpine. I ran into a couple bumps but the community on Matrix was really helpful and I was able to get booted into XFCE after only a few hours. Finally! I can enjoy full desktop linux on a smartphone! Granted I accepted it was always going to be a secondary device, I didn't even try putting my sim in it and I doubt cameras will ever work, but having desktop linux on mobile worked exactly as great as I was hoping. I wrote a few scripts to build a rudimentary podcast player and used it daily for that purpose. I eventually moved away from XFCE to I3 which worked surprisingly well as a mobile interface.
I eventually got a pinephone and played around with it only to be a little disappointed. I knew it was gonna be slow, but I didn't expect it to be as slow as it was. Plus the battery life on it was atrocious, not lasting more than a couple hours with the screen on and not lasting more than 4 with the screen off. No amount of playing with CPU speeds allowed me to use it outside the house for very long without needing to bring a portable charger. Plus it was fragile as all get out. I cracked the screen within the first week and eventually destroyed the screen completely after having it in my back pocket. I say all this, but I really do think this is the right way we should go with mobile linux and I am eager to see further developments in the future.
After the second broken screen I gave up and went back to the Moto G4 and I still use it daily. I'm able to comfortably watch youtube on it and I wrote a terminal podcast app to handle all my listening. Falkon works pretty good as a mobile browser (Firefox mobile config is too heavy) and the battery life on it is great!. I think once a couple more renditions of pinephones come out I might get another and I'll be able to completely get rid of my android phone but until then I'm living the two (sometimes three) phone lifestyle.