I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone’s release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.
I don’t daily drive one but I’ve been keeping a close eye on it and here’s my opinions: postmarketos seems to have the most momentum out of any distro (you can see device support here). I do believe it will be viable eventually as a lot of work is actively being done. This month they announced two grants that were accepted for 4g volte calling and firefox on mobile improvements. They are also working on porting systemd to alpine so that gnome mobile and plasma mobile can be run without any workarounds. Also the oneplus6/6t seems to be the most hopeful for a daily driver.
tldr: I don’t think it’s currently viable but work and money is currently being put towards projects to fix that
It depends. It’s viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it’s probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven’t checked the status in recent time. And then there’s this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won’t have any chance if you’re dependent on such an app (thankfully it’s rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).
Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular “platforms” for mobile apps that establishing a “third” platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it’s open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it’s hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you’re not “limited” anymore. (At least if you consider it “limited” when you can’t run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be “limited”).
So I think it’s less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.
[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]
To your point, I tried for a bit and truly the one thing I couldn’t live without was Signal.
The Signal Linux client isn’t working on a phone?
Signal is also one of my essential apps, but I wasn’t expecting a problem there, as I’ve Signal running on my desktop and laptop.
Phone just not beefy enough or what is the issue with it?
Flare? It’s hardly complete. Can’t even use it as a primary device.
As for the desktop app, it’s not exactly mobile oriented.
Gonna pull your leg here and say Android or, as I’ve recently taken to calling it, busybox + Linux + Google
Actually thanks for the akshually, because I had no idea about its existence
I’m surprised nobody mentioned Droidian yet. It’s the best of both worlds: You get a Linux phone with Phosh and an actual camera + sensors working due to the Android kernel. Check it out here: https://droidian.org/
It supports Waydroid out of the box, allowing you to run Android apps such as Whatsapp, Bitwarden and even Google Playstore, etc.
The new Firefox is miles away from what PostmarketOS offers. The only downside is you need a supported device, as per https://devices.droidian.org/.
So yes, I do drive Droidian daily, but I have an Android phone nearby just in case I need something specific.
