The original Pine phone is sooooo underpowered it's pretty much unstable except for like dev purposes :/
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Linux Phones
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The GPU in the thing is old enough that Firefox and GTK4 apps are not hardware accelerated. It's kinda sad since I actually kind of like the pinephone hardware excluding the SOC. It's too bad that no one has really come out with anything better afaik that has the same openness (other than the librem 5, but that thing is hella expensive), really only leaving android phones, which have their own issues that are IMO worse than just a slow processor.
I'm not knowledgeable about Linux phones at all, but I read the other day that Ubuntu Touch works on Fairphones. Maybe this is an option for you?
It's also hella expensive for hardware that was release three years ago. But yeah it's another option.
I have a OnePlus 6T that also works pretty well with Mobian/Postmarket. I would probably daily drive it if Signal had a Gtk app (yes I know about Flare).
Yeah, I've tried both the Pixel 3a, Pinephone, and Oneplus 6 with PostmarketOS. PostmarketOS is pretty awesome, and the fact that it even works on phones originally running android is impressive. But the Oneplus 6, even though it's one of the best supported android devices for PostmarketOS still has numerous issues the pinephone does not have:
- Broken selfie camera processing
- cannot wake from suspend upon receiving SMS or call
- No usb OTG
- Getting GPS to work requires some crazy process involving flashing specific versions of android, which I've not figured out how to do.
- Visual corruption sometimes when waking from suspend
As per this thread the Fairphone 6 (just released few weeks ago) will probably also be supported one day but I guess that depends more on the Linux devs than on the hardware.
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/11097/fairphone-gen-6-is-there/6
And a OnePlus is not comparable IMHO in terms of rapairability, sustainability and open source support.
Ubuntu touch has relatively wide support for android devices, since it uses the original Manufacturer kernel, with all it's hacks and lack of updates.
Why is that? Are they sticking to pure open firmware or something?
That's too bad. I was thinking about trying the Pro at one time.