Skip Navigation
Linux @lemmy.ml joel_feila @lemmy.world

Linux phones

Anyone use one of those Linux phones like pine phone or librem.

I was looking at a few months ago but settled on a deggooled phone. Are there user friendly distros for them?

84

You're viewing a single thread.

84 comments

  • The big sticking point for me is the camera. It seems like they all have bad (or even non-functioning) cameras. I don't own a camera. My phone is my camera. I can't switch to a phone that can't be my camera.

    • I have been daily driving a PinePhone/Pro but I keep my old Galaxy Note 8 close by if I'm going anywhere I want a camera.

      • @CalcProgrammer1 @KindaABigDyl
        How does the battery stack against galaxy? My biggest concern is getting Linux phone that will act like it has 3-4 year old battery that is clearly dying.

        • The battery on the PinePhones is pretty terrible unfortunately. The processors just eat way too much power. There is a patch being worked on that reduces idle power draw on the PinePhone Pro, but it still won't get you near a modern Android phone. The keyboard case is helpful in part because it adds 2x the internal battery capacity, but it's still going to need charging more often than a Galaxy. At least the battery is removable. Maybe they can fix it with software, but I doubt it will ever get to the same power consumption levels of a modern Android just because the PinePhone and Pro are using such outdated (and not mobile-focused) chips. They had to choose the chips based around what had good Linux support, not based on what had good power consumption unfortunately.

          The OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS is showing potential though, with much better battery life than the PinePhone. However, calling support still has some issues so I can't recommend it as a daily driver even for the basic call and text use case. Hopefully soon, as the hardware is a lot better in both performance and power consumption/battery life.

    • Ubuntu Touch on an Android phone might provide some middle ground. I have an old Nexus 6P with Ubuntu Touch on it, the camera is performing surprisingly well - better than some popular open source camera apps I have tried on Android. :)

    • Well with all the models that use lineage os you could probably find a good camera

      • LineageOS is Android. I think it was implied the user meant GNU/Linux distros on phones like Mobian or PostmarketOS which run on things like the Pine Phone since if we were talking about using Android, we could just keep our current phones, so that's what I was referring to when I said they had bad cameras

You've viewed 84 comments.