Why isn't Linux on Phone better than it is?

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QuackdocTech@reddit

I used to sell and maintain phones for years. As someone who has dealt with loads of people, I can say that most of the issues people are commenting I don't think are relevant.

The DEs themselves suck. Phosh isn't very usable unless you are a very specific person. Scaling for instance is horrendously bad on phosh. Plasma mobile just straight up lacks forethought. They actually thought it was a good idea to replace a universal back button, with a button that just out right closes the active window... WTF. Lomiri is absolutely the "best of the bunch", but it's for sure quite the learning curve, and iirc only recent;y because more widely availible outside of UBTouch.

OSKs aren't portable. There aren't that many OSKs to begin with on linux, But each DE ties their own OSK fairly badly. mallit on KDE, Squeekboard on phosh etc. And getting them to play nice with each other is just not a thing without crappy hacks. The OSK is such a major component that this alone will make you swap to a new system even if everything else is perfect for you, if it doesn't work out.

A lot of the work is "ecosystem dependant" Ubuntu touch work is mostly UBTouch, Sailfish is mostly sailfish work etc. PMOS is one of the few ecosystems that's work is done in a very generic manor. That's not to say sailfish and ubtouch work never leave their ecosystem, but pmos is by far the leader of stuff like this.

The app ecosystem isn't really all that bad, It's not good, but the basics are there. the issue is accsessing and finding these apps. There is also a massive lack of portability here. We really need a dedicated mobile flatpak repo, because every existing flatpak gui bloody sucks for exposing "phone apps" and then a lot of appstream metadata doesn't accurately reflect the usability of apps. A large part of the issue is bloody finding the apps in the first place. (Flatpak also has very dissapointing choices regarding security due to their instance on having as little permissions popups as possible). This plays heavily into the previous point of work being very intertwined into ecosystem specific things.

The lack of good hardware is not an issue here. Let's be realistic, It's linux a good compositor Is the most important factor here. Phoc I found to be insanely buggy, Plasma mobile is kwin, mutter is mutter, Lomiri is... Not really sure here. We have compositors that are fast enough for phones. And linux apps are linux apps, they will usually run on a potato. It's probably an issue for some people, but most people wouldn't really care as long as it's fast enough.

There are other issues, but these are the major ones I've personally found, and got correspondence for when I used family and friends as guinea pigs

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

Linux apps running on potato is meaningless. It’s not the execution speed that is the primary concern, but energy efficiency. Android pauses background apps quite aggressively, in part because it has the ability to do so. It can ask the app to save its state and the app will be able to come back 100% the same, because it is expected of them. Apple is even more strict here.

The linux kernel can suspend processes, but that’s like killing vs asking to quit. An android app may go to the background and stop processing its event loop, but still play some music. This is absolutely incompatible with traditional linux desktops, there are no APIs/specificaitons for that. Without a change in model, the linux userspace is simply unusable on mobile devices (laptops sort of included. Their battery life also sucks)

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QuackdocTech@reddit

I would say that too much stock is being put into this. Android has toms of background processes that absolutly chew through battery that Linux simply doesn't have.

Very little Linux devices are going to have the constant non stop background of garbage like gapps, with its insane amount of telemetry and stuff.

Even looking at modern devices that are battery powered and running Linux today SBCs on batteries are a good example, you still get decent battery life from them.

not super great, but more then enough for a phone. Especially if you pair it with something like system76-scheduler which does have foreground aware process management.

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horsewarming@reddit

You can't compare a potential mass-market linux phone with modern capabilities with a SBC. On a typical phone, you would have like 8 messaging apps, email client, maps, etc. Now how would you like a typical Linux app to receive notifications without it actually running with a full-blown UI and RAM consumption in the background? Literally none current Linux application can be suspended only to be woken up when a notification comes. And you need to suspend them not only to conserve battery life but RAM is very limited too in those cases... and you probably don't want your phone to just freeze when you're OOM because that's what a typical Linux desktop does.

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PureTryOut@reddit

Plasma mobile just straight up lacks forethought. They actually thought it was a good idea to replace a universal back button, with a button that just out right closes the active window... WTF

To be honest, the Plasma devs agree that the button should be replaced or at least removed. It's mostly a legacy thing that hasn't found something to replace it with yet. A universal back button isn't easy to implement though, the existing software that is meant to run on this system just isn't developed with such a system in mind and wouldn't work as is. Implementing it would be a ton of work that I'm not sure is worth it.

Are there other things you think it lacks forethought of?

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

phosh is great imho but i am very much that person.

I agree that HW performance isnt really the main issue since if it was i would have upgraded to a pinephone pro long ago.

I personally think squeekboard is fine but again, i have never daily driven any touchscreen device not running phosh so my expectations are based of of squeekboard.

At some point I began suspecting that an intel/amd linux phone needs to be built. Like you said, performance is less of an issue so i figure the most power efficient lowest spec x86_64 chipset might solve alot of the issues without sacrificing to much if any battery life given how outdated the a64 is in terns of efficiency standards.

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QuackdocTech@reddit

One of the more important factors is gpu acceleration. GPU acceleration is a massive battery saver in general due to modern gui toolkits being designed and optimized for it. (and ofc responsiveness). With good support for this (Mali in general is really bad on linux) efficiency would be greatly increased.

I have high hopes for riscv based phones with linux due to PowerVR officially supporting and hiring devs to work on mesa (I never ever thought I would say this up until this actually happened).

I tried phosh for a while on my tablet which was unusable due to it having poor scaling. On really small devices and really large devices phosh I find falls apart very quickly. Squeekboard seems to only support (at the time of my testing) integer multiple scaling.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

I use phosh on my phone and tablet and I agree it has some issues with scaling mainly with the file browsers on the tablet. I am just used to dealing with it so it doesnt really bother me overly often.

Which tablet did you try it on?

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QuackdocTech@reddit

I have an x86 tablet, chuwi hi10x, currently it's running arch + plasma mobile. But I plan on swapping it back to BlissOS soon.

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archontwo@reddit

You should see if you can use Sailfish.

That is Linux and a very nice modern and functional experience it is too.

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coder111@reddit

Used Sailfish daily between ~2011 and ~2013. The need to run mainstream apps on modern hardware won the convenience of running Sailfish. Now I run Android LineageOS.

Sailfish OS itself was great. Gesture based interface was brilliant once you got used to it. Native apps were great too when available. It also had the best terminal app on mobile by far.

There's still /r/jolla and /r/sailfishos for the enthusiast still dabbling in it.

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oldschoolthemer@reddit

If I recall correctly, Sailfish wasn't available until November 2013 when the Jolla One released, right? It was nice to have MeeGo Harmattan in the meantime between 2011 and 2013, though.

Also, seamless Android app support is actually part of why I stuck with Sailfish for much of the past decade. Of course, there were some small gaps in compatibility, but mostly the same issues you'd run into on Lineage OS without Google Play.

In any case, yeah, Sailfish's UI design is still arguably the best I've ever used on a mobile phone. I really wish they went fully FOSS with it, I think that's a big part of why it didn't take off in the Linux community.

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jlindf@reddit

There is now official port for Sony Xperia 10 devices, Android apps run really well, Bluetooth on Android apps had some issues earlier, don't know if they are fixed, since I don't use Bluetooth. Camera is a bit wonky due to Sony not opensourcing the camera driver.

I've been daily driving Sailfish since 2014, started with Jolla phone, currently using Xperia 10 III.

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coder111@reddit

Yeah, I was thinking about getting one, but I'm afraid for me personally it's too late.

Now my phone must run a banking app, a security app to connect to my work, another security app to connect to stock exchange. All of those would probably have problems running on SailfishOS. Banking app complains enough that my phone is rooted already...

On top of that I don't have enough time to tinker these days. I'm seriously considering getting latest Google Pixel phone next to avoid having to install LineageOS and spend days setting things up...

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archontwo@reddit

You should be using Magisk and Magisk hide. Blacklist google services and the app and they can't tell you are rooted.

Worked for me for years.

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jlindf@reddit

Yeah, my banks app also keeps whining that it requires Google services to run, but it still works after dismissing the error. I dread the day someone notices that bug and fixes it.

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PureTryOut@reddit

My problem with Sailfish is that it's more proprietary than AOSP. The UI is proprietary, most of the core apps are, it's Android support is.

At that point I rather use open-source AOSP (or ROMs based on it) than use that proprietary ecosystem.

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witchhunter0@reddit

Show me the ISO

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grem75@reddit

Show me a phone with a CD drive.

There are images for supported devices to be flashed over fastboot.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

While my "main device" is really my desktop computer, my main phone and my only smartphone is a PinePhone running Manjaro ARM Plasma Mobile. (I have always refused to use smartphones before the PinePhone.) So I would not say it is "completely unusable" for that. But it requires putting up with limitations and bugs, yes. The main limitation being that mainstream apps (even popular mobile FOSS apps such as OsmAnd) do not run natively. Some may or may not run under Waydroid, but I am not running any, only mobile GNU/Linux FOSS apps. I have a phone dialer and a SMS application (Spacebar) as part of Plasma Mobile, a browser (Angelfish), an e-mail client (Geary), and some more applications, most coming from Plasma Mobile or from GNOME/Phosh. I do not have WhatsApp or anything like that. There are other limitations (such as power management limitations leading to a short battery autonomy), but I think app support is the main roadblock for mainstream adoption.

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PureTryOut@reddit

Any reason you're using Manjaro? They have dropped the boat on mobile front at least and I would really recommend using anything else. For a while their Plasma Mobile image was completely unmaintained even, even though it was still pre-installed on PinePhones. I wouldn't trust them for anything (personal opinion).

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

same here, i have been on a pinephone since early 2022 and before that i just didnt have a smart phone. (Execpt I use phosh.)

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shadows1123@reddit

Is AOSP not an alternative?

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PureTryOut@reddit

An alternative to Android? No, AOSP is Android but OP talks about Linux mobile which explicitly is not Android.

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Leghari_K@reddit

Linux on the phone can be truly awesome. Apparently you never used Maemo Linux that came bundled Nokia N900. I installed EasyDebian on top too. It was a one in a lifetime experience while it lasted.

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PureTryOut@reddit

Maemo is still alive btw, as Maemo Leste. Nowadays they're kinda doing their own thing though (sticking to X11, actively choosing a non-systemd platform because systemd, etc).

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dcherryholmes@reddit

WebOS was kind of like that, too. I liked having a LAMP stack in my pocket back in 2008.

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GM4Iife@reddit

Maemo was way better than Android. I guess that Nokia started with that too early. Average users didn't wanted real OS on their phones in past. Now it could be the real boss in OS.

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alejandronova@reddit

And Meego Harmattan. It remains to be seen what would have happened if the N9 had been successful.

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HungarianManbeast@reddit

I still hold on to my N900 and turning it on occasionally. It was one of the best Proof of Concept devices ever

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Shished@reddit

Because phone manufacturers tend to not upstreaming the drivers for their devices.

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adamkex@reddit

Don't they need to release the source code for the drivers?

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PureTryOut@reddit

Kernel stuff: yes. What /u/Buo-rentLin said applies though. However because companies do not want to open-source their drivers, they just don't implement them in the kernel. Most Android drivers actually run in userspace and thus do not have to be open-sourced, so companies just don't. These can as-is not be used on Linux mobile, unless you resort to hacks like Halium/libhybris.

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mrtruthiness@reddit

Does NVIDIA release the source for its drivers? The answer is that it is not legally settled whether loadable kernel modules need to be compatible with the Linux kernel license (GPLv2only).

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Buo-renLin@reddit

Release the source code doesn't mean it'll be upstreamed to the kernel, stuffs must be done to do that.

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adamkex@reddit

That makes sense. I guess there needs to be more volunteers because companies are too lazy to upstream.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

But they haven't mostly released any sources, so that isn't really that big of a concern yet.

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Yi@reddit

Heavily modified kernels suck. I tried PostmarketOS on my lg-hammerhead and a lot of kernel stuff is not implemented yet while mainstreaming.

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rokejulianlockhart@reddit

It's very device-dependent.

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kuroimakina@reddit

People really don’t realize how much it comes down to driver support.

Developing for ARM sucks. There’s no real standards. Then you have so much hardware that needs to go into a phone, and next to none of it has FOSS drivers. People could reverse engineer the hardware and drivers - look at asahi Linux for example, or the Nexus 5 back in the day - but why would they, when those drivers are only likely to work for a small number of devices. Each mainstream device would need a whole team reverse engineering and implementing the drivers.

Mix all of that with the fact that dozens of new phones come out every year, and old stuff routinely gets dropped out, and it just isn’t viable.

If the drivers were all available, it would probably be done already. This is why libhybris was originally created, to try to bridge this gap. But, it ended up being way too messy to work with.

If there was any consistency in the ARM space, and if the drivers were readily available for Linux, we’d have full fledged Linux distros for the phone. As it stands though, it’s currently unlikely to ever happen.

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DuckDatum@reddit

What if we strategically selected a specific phone line and focused out efforts there. Looking for - Long term manufacturer support - Open source availability of, any drivers? - Good metrics elsewhere, like repairability.

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Vallamost@reddit

Didn’t Ubuntu try that and it turned into a dumpster fire?

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Spiderfffun@reddit

Ubuntu touch is still going I believe.

So is postmarketos.

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DumbleWorf@reddit

Ubuntu touch is still going I believe.

They forked to ubports which barely has a pulse.

Most of these are enabled through halium, which just uses stock android kernels with their own software on top. Which loops back to the point that making bootloaders and drivers for these devices is a royal pain.

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Spiderfffun@reddit

True. But it can still run linux apps.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

I just remember them not getting as much money as they needed to actually achieve the effort.

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Vallamost@reddit

True, they were forcing that god awful Unity UI down peoples throats that didn't even allow you to have desktop icons.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

Unity was the least of the problems. The real problems were GPL3 + CLA and lying about wayland.

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kuroimakina@reddit

Realistically if they did that, it should be the Pixel. The pixel is honestly the best candidate anyways. It’s unlocked and fully rootable, and iirc Google was working on getting certain drivers mainlined (though that might be a dead effort). It would make sense, since the nexus 5 was the OG Linux phone. Everyone else already works on it too, due to Google happily letting you flash whatever you want to it, so it has first class support for basically every Android offshoot.

There would have to be the “political will” though, and right now, it’s just not there. Everyone wants to have Linux on mobile, but no one wants to actually code it.

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studog-reddit@reddit

GrapheneOS is a start?

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atthereallicebear@reddit

that's just android

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blenderbender44@reddit

There are open source Linux phones line lines phone, pine phone. So the community could focus on supporting these open hardware phones rather than proprietary android phones? If the Linux phone OS was good enough just pay for the supported hardware

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kuroimakina@reddit

The pinephone is unfortunately laughably weak hardware wise. It’s barely stronger than a pi5, the screen is 720p, the battery life is subpar - overall it’s about the strength of a budget phone from 4 years ago. One of my previous roommates bought one. He liked it in theory, but never ended up using it, because it was laggy, slow, and had a lot of quirks. Many of the software issues may have been fixed by now, but there has been no hardware revision.

Hell, if they released a version with a flagship Qualcomm chip from, say, 2022, with 8GB of RAM and 512GB flash storage, plus at least a 1080p screen - then we’d be talking. As it is though? You’ll be pretty disappointed with it.

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Camelstrike@reddit

The whole point of a pine phone is to use hardware with open source libraries and you want to put a Qualcomm chip hehe

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blenderbender44@reddit

What about libre phone ?

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JawnZ@reddit

I'm pretty sure the pine phone is weaker than the RPi5.

PinePhone: 4 x ARM Cortex A53 cores @ 1.152 GHz

RPi5: Broadcom BCM2712 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, with cryptography extensions, 512KB per-core L2 caches and a 2MB shared L3 cache

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Morphized@reddit

The problem is that there's no firmware standard for reporting hardware on embedded ARM. Even if there were a ton of mobile Linux devices floating around, a distribution would need to package a separate kernel for each one if they wanted to keep the software up to date. If a phone could generate its own device tree and expose it to the kernel, we'd have way more options.

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blenderbender44@reddit

Hmmm. So maybe Linux phone should abandon arm and all in risc-V ?

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Morphized@reddit

It doesn't have anything to do with the architecture. Any SoC could have ACPI tables or just expose the device tree. Most of them just don't, and chances are RISC-V embedded boards won't either.

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blenderbender44@reddit

But it’s open source, if someone wants it to have ACPI tables couldn’t they just fork the design and add in the feature ?

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Morphized@reddit

Do you have a mass PCB production setup on hand?

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Dense-Firefighter495@reddit

Apple switching to silicon is fine to me but bruh, microsoft copying? Are they dumb? So not only you get new devices where you're stuck with windows but you're also having a device where you can't do anything with it, glory to our good old x86

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Floofmeister6@reddit

This is why I'm hesitant on Linux going into arm, I'd rather just want computing to move to risc-v.

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sylfy@reddit

The way I see it, encouraging ARM adoption on PCs can only be a step in the right direction, since PC hardware manufacturers tend to want cross-compatibility. That could in turn lead to more standardised drivers. Phone manufacturers have no incentive to do so, since they simply sell you a device with integrated parts.

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No-Bison-5397@reddit

Doesn’t RISC-V suffer from the same configurability?

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ThinkingWinnie@reddit

Yep, perhaps even worse, since there are no licensing fees anyone can go and create their own custom processor that requires custom drivers.

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dtvjho@reddit

The good news is that some chips like transceivers get popular with developers and wind up in a lot of phone models. Drivers for those will end up supporting a lot of phones once written. Even for chips that get new models, they are usually not that different from the other variants in their chip family, meaning a driver won’t need much work done to it to get it working. A new phone model that does get a new chip, often the engineer picked a chip used elsewhere meaning a driver might already exist. The heaviest workload for a team would be in the beginning, when no chip has a driver made, then lighten over time as the library builds

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encee222@reddit

...and very few phones give you the bootloader access necessary to even make that choice if you had drivers.

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

If that would be the primary case then linux laptops would have normal battery lives.

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edparadox@reddit

Don't forget the unreleased, and unpatched firmware versions.

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Shadow_Galecross@reddit

Linux mobile is in such a sad state because achieving true open source standards is more important to devs than achieving an stable and reliable experience. I'm not judging, just stating the facts.

Linux mobile community is big and it has many collaborators , but they are spread on so many different projects so their power is highly reduced. Also there is almost no monetization incentive, so many devs just make apps out of love for the project.

A Linux phone that just works already exists and it's called FLX1 (from Furilabs). They have resigned to use HALIUM and Phosh on a lightly outdated kernel with the help of Mediatek just so they can offer an actually working experience.

Calls, Alarm, Camera , SMS , android apps and native apps works , even if it's hacky. It's hardware is modern, waterproof and they have an incredible supportive community. Ideals should never be more important than the wellbeing of those you care for

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erwan@reddit

If you mean outside of Android, the problem is 3rd party apps. If you just need to make phone calls, send/receive SMS and browse the web you're fine with postmarketOS or other Linux distro.

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Hugiinn@reddit

Yea today with things like home banking and digital id it would be impossible for a 3rd mobile os to gain traction

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theunquenchedservant@reddit

Unless you were able to emulate an android environment when needed. Similar to wine for windows applications or proton for steam games, etc. Something where you don't need to boot up a virtual device and then load the app, but seamlessly open the app from the phone and it's emulated as android

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Hugiinn@reddit

Congratulations, now you're just running diet android lol

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Morphized@reddit

Wouldn't most people want Android but on top of a normal Linux system? The only thing that Linux does that Android doesn't is run regular Linux tools.

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Hugiinn@reddit

Android can already run classic tools through termux, and if Google actually implements the terminal it will be even easier. There really is no reason to want a gnu base instead of android, considering that it's better at doing phone things.

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ryanmcgrath@reddit

This is (somewhat) of a thing already, and it's a phone you can buy and experiment with.

http://furilabs.com

(I'm somewhat shocked I don't see a link to it anywhere in this thread.)

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LonelyNixon@reddit

waydroid would be this for the most part. It's not perfect but works fairly well. The only thing is Im unsure how well it would work with some of the more sensitive apps like banking and money sending.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

Do those vms pass safetynet? if they don't, the apps won't work anyways

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_Mr-Z_@reddit

I've heard even for basic phone stuff, it can be hit-or-miss on Linux, then there is also the battery life, my PinePhone Pro is lucky to get an hour out of that battery with basic browser usage, I've been unwilling to toss my SIM in it should I receive any important calls during my "test" period.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

Calls should be pretty reliable with the aftermarket modem firmware.

I have been on on og pinephone as my only phone since early 2022 and havent upgraded to a pro due to cost but since they use the same modem I assume they should be about the same in that aspect.

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_Mr-Z_@reddit

How's the battery on the original pinephone? I got the pro to have a cool toy to learn some stuff, but it's hard to use when it charges slow and discharges so damn fast, and heats up like a stove under heavy usage...

Glad to hear calls can be good though, I might toss my SIM in it some time this week and give it a shot.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

I dont use mine much throughout the day besides sms/mms so for me the battery life fine at anywhere between 75% of a day and 3 days. I also have IRQbalance enabled which seems to help.

I usually charge it overnight and if i were going somewhere where i needed longer battery life i would bring my 2 extra batteries and my keyboad case. I have never needed to do this since that would be like a week of above normal usage.

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DownvoteEvangelist@reddit

The number of people working on it is probably super low... Probably a lot less than custom android roms...

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LonelyNixon@reddit

To be fair I feel like the prevalence and importance of apps is overstated these days. In the late 00s and early 10s they were a necessity due to a combination of slower data speeds, webstandards of the day, and weaker hardware. These days a lot of websites are more touch friendly, and with phones having way more horsepower and faster internet browsing most websites and social media doesnt need to be in app form it just wants to be so it can get more of your data.

On top of that there are more and more linux programs that arent a chore to use with touch screen anymore with stuff like gnome apps having scaling ui's that work well on a small screen with finger.

That said there are some big things that would be missing from the device. Stuff like ticket and transit apps, banking and money sending apps, payment apps. You can live without them but they are big ones. I know waydroid can work pretty well and somewhat bridge the gap but I suspect that bank and money sending apps may not play nice.

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

No way, even for that it is crazy unreliable.. like it can barely hold charge.

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irodov4030@reddit

have you compared postmarketOS and ubuntu touch?

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T_Woj@reddit

You know that Android is basically dedicated linux for phones?

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brownphoton@reddit

Like with everything else, engineering something to work reliably takes tremendous efforts, money and time. We’re living in crazy times where people are so used to getting stuff for cheap with little effort, but that’s not how things work in general.

Reverse engineering hardware is hard, but it’s doable if there’s motivation. How much time/money have you personally invested in getting Linux to work on phones?

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Informal_Cry687@reddit

Android is linux for phone there is even an ap that can create a full debian distro on top of it using GNURoot.

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H_man14@reddit

I daily drive the FLX1 running FuriOS. Runs about as well as I need for a phone. Signal and regular calling all work fine. Plus there's an android layer for anything else.

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DorphinPack@reddit

Mobile hardware is also often a licensing nightmare. Jumping through hoops just to get access to a blob so you can use one of the chips is not something a lot of FOSS projects can undertake.

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Kilgarragh@reddit

Honestly if I could put a linux de(gnome mobile my beloved) on android id be fine.

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Guilty-Entrance1535@reddit

I use a GPD 4 handheld. Love it

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BradChesney79@reddit

Binary blobs.

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zer0xol@reddit

What do you mean, Android is Linux

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Inf1n1teSn1peR@reddit

Uhhh. I get the post, but Android is Linux. So that claim is not that great.

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Outrageous_Trade_303@reddit

It's work in progress. You need to wait several years. The linux on mobiles experience reminds me the linux on desktop experience back in 2000.

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stone_cold_kerbal@reddit

I was there, Gandalf. Back in 2009 when the Nokia N900 released. Fantastic little phone with touchscreen, physical keyboard and all running on linux (maemo, I think).

It went the way of all good things; lost to time, but not to memory.

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Outrageous_Trade_303@reddit

all running on linux (maemo, I think).

Well, if you are thiking that way, you have also to accept that the majority of today's phones are also running linux (Android) :p

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omniuni@reddit

Just lack of development on a non-android stack. Linux as Android on phones is FOSS and great!

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Morphized@reddit

Android's main issues is that it can't run desktop programs and the whole UI is stuffed into an immutable base image. You have to flash the ROM if you want a different notification center. I bet there would be more enthusiasm if there were an Android image that used apps to create the UI instead, so you could swap them out.

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DFS_0019287@reddit

I had a Nokia N-900 that ran Linux and it was pretty good. Unfortunately, it's a very old device and stopped receiving updates and it became impractical to keep using it.

Linux on a phone could be good if it had manufacturer support, but unfortunately that support is nonexistent.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

do you still have it?

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DFS_0019287@reddit

No. It eventually died and I sent it for recycling.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

tragic, those are considered pieces of history among mobile linux enthusiasts.

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flaccidcomment@reddit

Because they don't want you to install an alternate OS on your phone. They want you to buy a new one after they push updates that slows your phone down, and the cycle continues.

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edgmnt_net@reddit

That's more of a side-effect of the product development process. There's a lot more than that under the surface, though, consider locked-down IP, different regulations across the world, warranty, legal liabilities, reduced competition, extremely complex standards and stuff like that. There aren't many cellular modem vendors or GPU vendors and a phone needs to meet at the intersection of a lot of those things to compete. And be cheap. So what happens is you get it cheap and reasonably modern and powerful, but you also get a 1-2 years warranty, no support beyond that, no open ecosystem, no long-term replacement parts, no right to open it up then sue them if you break something and they refuse to fix it and so on.

To some degree replacing the phone is advantageous, because no matter how open and good it is it's still going to be an old phone 5 years from now. To some degree this is forced by a very odd legal and economic climate.

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krakarok86@reddit

Nice answer, people often fail to see the complexity behind those things.

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CompetitionSquare240@reddit

linux users especially

which is ironic because they should be more attuned to the finer details

they lack the emotional intelligence to put these abstract concepts together.

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mitchMurdra@reddit

They lack a whole lot more than that. A lot of these people are teens, literal children who haven't finished developing in the head. A lot of people take on this "us versus them" mentality and actively hate on anything that is not their favorite topic or thing in this stage of life.

Some people never leave it and there are definitely some older folk who happily spread FUD in reddit's larger Linux communities. But evidently not everybody "grows up" and continues to treat even Linux as some kind of "team" to be part of and against anything which does not directly support it.

You can look at the aftermath of any huge NFL match for proof there are some videos at the top of publicfreakout this week showcasing the casual assault people will commit on those of an opposing team and none of them were even playing.

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urbrainonnuggs@reddit

It's hard enough keeping Linux desktop working as it is!

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

wdym?

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jsomby@reddit

Currently it's next to impossible to make actually open phone so it's not also technical it's ethical problem for Linux enthusiastics.

But drivers also. And it's quite niche market.

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ElMarkuz@reddit

There were attempts to do open phones and modular ones... turns out, people don't care about it sadly. It's great that PCs are open as they are, a relic from past generations nowadays.

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Makefile_dot_in@reddit

i mean, most Android smartphones also let you install custom operating systems (even if OEMs are beginning to encroach this ability). the issue is a lack of drivers. for PCs, this issue is less pronounced with Linux since most manufacturers write Linux drivers, and where they don't, hobbyists often step in, but early on when Linux was smaller I'm pretty sure it was also harder to get drivers. so I don't think it's quite accurate to say that PCs are only as open due to the past generations

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ElMarkuz@reddit

Yes, these days is rare to have driver issues in Linux. I first started using gnu/linux back in 2009 with Ubuntu 9.10 and even then you encountered problems with some components, mostly in laptops or with printers/scanners

Valve also kinda helped with their support from steamOS.

Even then, you could build a custom pc with compatibility in mind, or change parts to some others that were supported. You don't have that with phones because every part is made specifically for a certain model, you can't change them.

Modular phones would be the solution, but people value more other aspects of the phones than the niche hardware customization or longevity aspect.

Sadly were always the niche market, even in the days of pc desktop as the primary tech in house, as people still preferred windows, ms office, and their pcs "just working".

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Morphized@reddit

They could market an exposed device tree as an international support feature for business travelers. Chances are, way more things than just LTE aren't going to work the same in every region.

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

But that is not due to the quite kid in the garage meticulously reverse engineering it, the fact that linux is so good nowadays is that it has 90+% paid employees from intel, amd, etc. Linux is the predominant operating system basically everywhere, besides PCs (which is a relatively small market compared to like the fkin cloud). It probably requires better drivers than windows in certain server hardware cases. (Like there are beast machines with terabytes of RAM that will never ever run windows).

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ElMarkuz@reddit

Of course, I won't deny that. Linux is a miracle compared to todays standard of the tech industry.

It doesn't exclude my argument that modular phones will rarely be a thing because the innate nature of the smartphones as they're seen by the majority of the market.

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AlterTableUsernames@reddit

Maybe it was just too early. I could imagine the idea of a not-throwawy-device could get more traction.

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lorsal@reddit

So fairphone?

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Ap0them@reddit

I love the idea of the Fairphone but I couldn’t think about buying one until they have better degoogled rom support. Like a Fairphone with grapheneos support would be my ideal phone.

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KittensInc@reddit

turns out, people don't care about it sadly

People do want an open phone. But people aren't willing to pay flagship-model prices for an entry-level phone from 5 years ago. What a surprise, huh?

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ElMarkuz@reddit

People in the US pays humongous money for the most closed phone and ecosystem ever with the iphones. Even Android is having problems with half of the market not caring about not being able to message normally between operating systems, and you expect that those people would care about hardware?

As I said, we have to accept that we are niche.

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

Iphones are not more expensive than comparable google/samsung flagships. Hell, with foldable phones in mind it is actually cheaper. Especially if you acknowledge that apple’s cpu game is always at least a generation ahead of everyone else’s, it’s really not unreasonably expensive.

It is closed though, unfortunately.

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AKushWarrior@reddit

If you can’t leverage the economies of scale major phone manufacturers do, that’s the only possible price point for an open phone.

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Daedalus1907@reddit

Does anyone know if the driver problem is one of closed source documentation for the hardware or just manpower to code them? I've been looking for a good side project and have a lot of wireless/driver experience.

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Brilliant_Curve6277@reddit

Yep

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poemsavvy@reddit

Cameras are a problem for one reason.

You cannot even pay to get a better camera.

Cameras aren't available.

Good camera modules are hyper-proprietary. You would have to make a business partnership to get a decent camera.

It's not feasible to make Linux phones work from a cost perspective and putting Linux on existing phones largely doesn't work when it comes to cameras.

If you want a Linux phone, you have to take the 5MP piece of crap

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

yep, the camera is really the only part ofthe pinephone that is basically unusably bad and has little hope of ever improving

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numblock699@reddit

Why would it be? It’s not good on the desktop either. It is a server OS trying do do stuff it was never made for.

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UPVOTE_IF_POOPING@reddit

How is Pine Phone doing nowadays?

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

been daily driving mine since early 2022, at this point it is a pretty mature product and i doubt i would have many if any issue if i went with a more stable distro and or didnt update so often.

I dont have the pro so who knows about that one.

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Adventurous-Test-246@reddit

This question is deeply flawed but from this prospective the issue is drivers.

It is usable if you care enough and dont expect native level android app support which is a stupid expectation since they are different platforms. This is like expecting to run apple's products on none apple machines or windows only games on a mac with native level performance. I have no expectation of running apple's notes app on a kindle because they are different systems.

Under what circumstances would you expect to play an playstation only game on a Xbox or Nintendo switch? Yet this is on par with what people expect from linux.

The only other thing that is outright not adequate and is nowhere close to usable (afaik) is the camera but again you can do without that with a little bit of work. If the pinephone could take legible pictures of things like Home work or other documents I wouldnt really have any complaints save the slower older hardware. Maybe the pro could do this with its better sensors but I my current pinephone was like 5$ used so a pro is out of the question given that what i have is fie for my needs.

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Malsententia@reddit

Because we sadly live in the timeline where Openmoko didn't magically beat the iPhone to market, thus solidifying FOSS's place in mobile hardware for all time.

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suraj_reddit_@reddit

ever heard of android?

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LighttBrite@reddit

What do you mean? There's an entire distro made for phones that aren't iOS.

It's called Android.

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bighi@reddit

For the same reason that desktop Linux is the least "developed" of the 3 big desktop operational systems: not enough money invested in it.

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norude1@reddit

Android is Linux

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Noobs_Stfu@reddit

Are you actively developing and contributing to a mobile Linux distro? No? There's your answer.

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ZombieJesus9001@reddit

For the same reason android makes for a really shitty laptop that people won't pay more than 2 or 3 hundred for.

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lacexeny@reddit

i think it's probably going to start getting better with the new Android updates being more linux friendly

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gojira_glix42@reddit

No third party support. Lack of any apps for daily needs and productivity. Device OEM aren't going to spend the money to develop firmware support for non Android OS. Thered no money in it

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Tail_sb@reddit

One word. Android

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Outrageous-Matter908@reddit

Linux is usable very well on particular phones. Why it's practically not usable, is the lack of apps on the system. That was also the coffin nail for Windows Phone. When you have for example not your messenger apps and no possibility to use your banking apps, then most likely you will go back to either Android or iOS.

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Tail_sb@reddit

One word. Android

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Important-Product210@reddit

What do you mean? Android is way better UX than let's say Maemo, that was nice as a concept but shipped shitty software that ran really slowly, like the gnome ecosystem (apt update waiting few minutes after every single operation in their package manager is unacceptable). Lack of Hardware driver support for what it's worth is the same in PC world and it's due to corporate greed and security concerns to drive sales behavior.

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timoshi17@reddit

because using phone is kinda not unnecessary. The only purpose is like SMS and calls, maybe also bank

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keyrnel@reddit

Does anyone have a librem 5 in their possession around here? I would like to know if your experience is positive

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Outside_Public4362@reddit

You think android is bad?

It took 20 years of development and tech giant to archive that.

And they became pioneer at different ways to sell user data while doing so.

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sunkenrocks@reddit

That doesn't follow. Google were already hopvering up user data when they bought Android, originally a camera OS

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Outside_Public4362@reddit

I picked up on android much later so I don't have information about what they did prior to that.

"Brought android" and " originally a camera OS" is so foreign to me about them. ( so they brought it, and worked for Nokia and Sony Xperia and Motorola ( I did read about this how they acquired Moto's patents in past).

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irodov4030@reddit

sell user data is big enough reason to say android is bad

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Practical_Cattle_933@reddit

Linux is plenty good on phones, it’s called android.

But if you expect that a desktop userspace developed by 3 people will somehow overtake the millions of developer hours spent by android devs, sweating blood to fix the kernel at many points, to create a whole userspace that is friendly to giving back memory gracefully and stopping and resuming being built into the apps’ core so that they can conserve every charge of energy and go to suspend all the time, then… well, it’s not gonna happen.

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Neptunian_Alien@reddit

Yeah, definitely too unusable to have 70% market share

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sandeep_96@reddit

android is a different story. recent versions have become more closed to be truly calling them linux. its more of a take from linux and giving back very little.

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sunkenrocks@reddit

This is backwards actually, recently Google have shown more willing to run full fat Linux apps under Android.

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S48GS@reddit

Because you do not need "just OS" on phone.

You need entire modern cloud-infrastructure and all modern apps working flawlessly and effortless.

To setup/develop similar to modern infrastructure - you need ten years and millions of money - and by time you finish developing it - it will be 10 years outdated to what corporations will give to consumers at its time.

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Kahless_2K@reddit

I mean, my Android phone seems to work quite well.

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Unairworthy@reddit

Because we don't have a patent troll extorting the big players. If that were to happen the big players would be like, here's our new royalty free MIT licensed OS.

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jimicus@reddit

The embedded world (which includes phones) has a dirty little secret:

Even though it mostly runs Linux, and even though a substantial amount of hardware absolutely must have kernel-level drivers - those drivers are seldom open-sourced and never submitted to upstream kernel development. You don't just see this in phones - routers, printers and TV set top boxes are in a similar position.

This is dubious from a GPL compliance perspective, but nobody's ever sued a phone manufacturer to demand these things. Which means that generic Linux distributions can never properly support the hardware.

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NostalgiaNinja@reddit

I wonder if it would be possible with the EU to force some sort of compliance to enable competition and openness of driver support..?

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jimicus@reddit

I think it's unlikely.

The x86 PC - where the OS can (relatively) quickly and easily be switched out by the end user - is a bit of an anomaly. Pretty much every other sort of technology that uses some sort of OS, if you're not using something directly from the vendor you are at least using something the vendor has given their blessing to.

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TheAutisticSlavicBoy@reddit

catch-22

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markoskhn@reddit

It's with great pleasure to inform you that Android is based on the Linux Kernel.

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Expensive_Finger_973@reddit

Because there is no financial incentive for OEMs to upstream their changes. They view anything they upstream as helping a competitor.

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DashNSmash@reddit

there just not that much demand so not much stuff is being done about it

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SadUglyHuman@reddit

Smartphones are locked down, proprietary piles of absolute trash that hide their secrets away from everyone but the phone makers.

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Zakman--@reddit

Linux (and monolithic kernels in general) is a bad model for phones. You need drivers in userspace for the model to work properly.

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Capt_Picard1@reddit

Hardware needs custom software/drivers.

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undrwater@reddit

Specifically drivers for the radios to work. It would be hard to put energy into a phone os or apps if the phone can't be used as a phone.

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FreeBSDfan@reddit

I had a thread on this. A big reason is we lack apps and developers would rather you use their app than website, so it hurts adoption of smaller OSes. Heck, post-sanction Huawei didn't survive outside China for this reason.

Desktop Linux (and Chrome OS) works because we have web apps. If Progressive Web Apps gain ground, it could help smaller mobile OSes.

It's also because of LineageOS, GrapheneOS and the like: if you could get an FOSS-ish OS with apps why use one without apps?

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runed_golem@reddit

1) a lot of manufacturers lock down the bootloader's on their devices so that it's difficult to install third party OSes

2) manufacturers don't always share drivers for the hardware

3) there are already really good degoogled versions of Android (which is technically a Linux based OS)

4) the userbase for other mobile Linux OSes is super low.

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Buo-renLin@reddit

there are already really good degoogled versions of Android (which is technically a Linux based OS)

Technically googled versions of Android is also technically one, otherwise great explanation.

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runed_golem@reddit

I know, I was mentioning the degoogled ones specifically because I know some people who ask for Linux on phones do so because they want out of Google's ecosystem.

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HurricaneFloyd@reddit

Because they don't want the user to have full control of the phone.

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rileyrgham@reddit

Because it and its plethora of guis is not designed for phones. It's taken android a long time to get there. That and there's few enough skilled programmers who are going to do it for free.

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enigmasi@reddit

Nokia N900

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aplethoraofpinatas@reddit

Lack of commercial interest in Linux Phone.

Best option is probably AOSP/Android.

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TexasGradStudent@reddit

Why not just use GrapheneOS?

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PtxDK@reddit

Originally android is a type of Linux, so i'd say, It's fairly popular. But it is also very true to say that the Linux spirit does not really live in the android ecosystem, because its not a very open system, especially since most manufacturers today is putting in various walls onto the android phones to stop you from loading a custom OS.

This would be my personal answer. There is Linux, it just doesnt feel much like it. 🥲

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ksandom@reddit

Yet again, there are viable phones on the market. I'm daily driving SailfishOS, but there are others.

Yes, in general there are challenges with drivers, but there are viable options available.

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chemhobby@reddit

Android is Linux.

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_hephaestus@reddit

I tried getting a custom ROM to work a while back for the unihertz titan, mostly worked well but there was a massive problem in connecting to Verizon despite the originally installed OS working fine. The documentation from Verizon about how to connect was sparse, went in circles a few times trying different configurations from the original Android. Sometimes had messaging or data for a time but never both.

It seems like other carriers play more nicely, but still, the low level network connectivity feels significantly more of a burden than with connecting to ethernet/wifi and doesn't help

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NullVoidXNilMission@reddit

I use termux, is not the same but at least it's a usable command line to be able to ssh into servers

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No_Pollution_1@reddit

What do you mean android is basically Linux.

The real answer though is active financial incentive to lock you out and have a closed system so you get their mandatory uninstallable apps that pay millions annually to be placed there.

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sCeege@reddit

So many people start these threads and get hung up over technical explanations to a market issue.

Linux has the technical potential to be as good as any other OS, I mean it isn’t an accident that Android used Linux as its kernel. I’m sure technical issues exists, like fragmentation of the distros and whatnot, but for the most part, a lot of these “Why isn’t Linux ___” has nothing to do with the features of Linux.

There is no financial interest in a lot of spaces where you need a backer to provide the infrastructure and bring in paying customers. Look at SteamOS and Valve’s contributions to Proton/Wine. Thats cold hard cash doing a lot of lifting and helping an open source space, but ultimately Valve didn’t do it out of the kindness of their heart. If Steam didn’t enjoy such a monopoly in the desktop gaming market place, I bet a gaming focused distro and Proton would be a lot lower on the priority list.

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Absurdo_Flife@reddit

I think that it is for the same reason that each device needs their own specific version of Android, even for custom ROMs. See here for example. The andswer there is basically - proprietary drivers.

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Odd-Possession-4276@reddit

From the technical standpoint, Maemo 6 aka MeeGo Harmattan was perfectly fine. Also Sailfish OS. Also Palm/HP WebOS.

Adoption rate and sound financial strategy is a separate thing. Current phone market is fully saturated apart from very niche needs (Sailfish → Aurora use case, some bring-your-own-network solutions for security and military purposes, HarmonyOS). The year of Linux on phones will be the pKVM thingy for Android.

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sidhfrngr@reddit

There's no market for it

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Cyber-tech-432@reddit

One of the main reason is security, if linux of phone gives as much control as linux on pc, then it's not a phone anymore, it's more of a power b*mb in some people's hand, so they heavily modify it to limit user access which makes it sucks for phone

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Yugen42@reddit

Not enough people working on it, not enough money invested - and tbh, while I'd be somewhat interested in an alternative approach to linux on a phone, Android IS Linux on a phone, it's huge and pretty great and FOSS, why not use that?

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CupZealous@reddit

Phone drivers for Android devices are shipped as binary blobs with only the features Android expects being properly ported and tested for. So you take the kernel and bootloader in the state it was ported which is a minimal set of features needed for Android, in addition to not having drivers you can edit the code of and build into the kernel. These devices aren't engineered to run a GNU/Linux environment only the Android specific features are ever tinkered with when porting the kernel. When OEMs do upstream their drivers to mainline kernel they don't provide fully functioning Linux drivers they only test the code in the context of their Android build.

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edparadox@reddit

We got this question every couple of weeks now ; the answer are non-distributed closed source firmware necessary to operate hardware, coupled with tweaked specific static build Android distribution used by phone manufacturers (even kernel tweaks are not upstreamed).

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CoronaMcFarm@reddit

It for the same reason that linux will never do well on any ARM devices, closed source drivers for everything.

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MatchingTurret@reddit

Why is this?

Because you didn't contribute. If you are interested, help.

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daemonpenguin@reddit

Why do you think it's barely usable? Have you tried it? Which distributions did you try? On what hardware? There are thousands of combinations of running Linux on smartphones (not including Android) and some of them are good, some are bad.

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PaddyLandau@reddit

This is the correct answer. The OP's question is too vague to be answerable.

There are some specialist Linux distributions for phones. One such example is Ubuntu Touch. But, as always, you need compatible hardware.

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DazedWithCoffee@reddit

The biggest problems are:

Proprietary firmware and closed documentation Inconsistent bootloading and device trees across the ARM Industry High cost of development Low demand Saturated market

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Slaykomimi@reddit

lol we neglected linux on phones for decades, of clurse its not as far developed as other stuff. I was surprised it even is still in development when I heard about it recently and glad someone finally picks it up. I would LOVE to change to a linux phone but I dont see that happening in the near future

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