It's been years since I considered linux phone since the pinephone project was entirely developer focused and barely usable. How is it these days? I mostly get by with Termux on my android phone which gives me basically full linux terminal with openssh/rsync, vim, tmux and the rest.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Linux Phones
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The Discussion on Linux-based Phones.
Benefits:
- Hardware freedom.
- Perfect operating-system competition.
- Full utilization of specs.
- Phone lifespan raises to 10+ years.
- Less e-waste.
Linux Mobile Distros:
- Postmarket OS
- Ubuntu Touch
- Mobian
- Sailfish
- Manjaro Arm
- Pure OS
- Plasma Mobile
- LuneOS
- FuriOS
- Nemomobile
- Droidian
- Mobile NixOS
- ExpidusOS
- Maemo Leste
- Tizen
- WebOS
Linux Mobile Hardware:
- Fairphone 5
- Volla Phone
- Librem 5
- PinePhone
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Difficult question. There's two types of Linux on Phones:
- Mainline Linux using the upstream Linux Kernel
- Downstream using the Android Kernel
Ubuntu Touch is a downstream Project. They use the Android Kernel and HAL and put their own userspace on top. This is nice because you get many features working pretty easily. The problem with this approach is that you are sitting on top of an unsupported kernel which will not receive updates when the vendor stops supporting your device.
Then there's PostmarketOS which is an upstream Linux mobile distribution. There are many more devices supported but there are only a few which are working well enough to be daily-driveable. This is because you have to write new drivers for Linux. The Android kernel sources are available but porting the drivers over is hard. Many of them are in userspace too where we don't have access to them. The currently best supported device (IMO) is the Oneplus 6 or maybe the Pixel 3a. You can daily-drive those devices if you can get used to some quirks. (For example my touchscreen randomly stopped working sometimes on the Pixel 3a and I had to reboot. But this is fixed now)
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3a_(google-sargo)
I have tried using Ubuntu Touch for a while but I found it hard to tinker with because it uses technologies which are not used in the Linux Desktop stack, the rootfs is read-only which means installing packages is harder, and some more things which I forgot.
With PostmarketOS you bascially have a Linux Desktop machine in your Pocket with a mobile User-Interface which you can tinker with as you like. That's why I really like using it.
I want Fairphone available in Canada!
Neat, wish there was a way to dual boot on the FP5.
I also see Ubuntu doesn't support wireless charging. No worries me thinks because neither does the FP5 hardware...
Has wireless charging improved much?
In my experience of using it early on, my phone would charge unbearably slow and would get unreasonably hot doing so.
Seems like a complete waste of energy to me.
I don't know, I've never had wireless charging.