Linux phones

They are not ready for regular use yet. Performance is poor and battery life is bad. It's fun to play with my Pinephone and watch the software slowly improve, but there is no way I could use it as my primary phone.

The only real issue holding it back for me is the battery life. I update the danctnix distro regularly to check progress, but the battery life is not production ready.
- You could buy the Pine keyboard to extend the battery life.

Check out !linuxphones@lemmy.ml

I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.

I tried a couple of distros/environments:

Mobian
Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
Manjaro + Phosh

My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.

I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.

Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.

If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.

I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn't work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.
- Strongly disagree. All things you mentioned are software issues. And they providing a phone with a bad specs intentionally. Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone. We simply do not have software. The idea is to provide relatively cheap hardware, so developers can start working on it. And another reason was to provide hardware that have some GNU/Linux support already to avoid asking community to start from scratch. Very few phones can run GNU/Linux because of lack of drivers.
  
  And yes, the keyboard is bad hardware-wise, I not satisfied with it either. But Pine did a lot for GNU/Linux on phones. Enthusiasts started writing software seriously only after PinePhone appearance.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware

Purism somehow has even worse hardware than the pinephone pro.

You pay about 50-100 dollars for the specs and between 1200 and 2000 dollars for phosh, the gnome-based phone shell. Which is free to use, but when you buy form Purism, you're paying for its' development.

PostmarketOS on oneplus6 is nice. 👍

+1 for this. PostmarketOS is definitely best privacy minded linux portable on smartphone.
Unfortunately it's not fully usable on the OnePlus 6/6T yet. I would love to daily drive my 6T but it only has working audio for the first call before you have to power cycle it. VoLTE doesn't work so you have to use 2G mode if you want to receive calls.
For the uninitiated, what is that? I am using lineageos on oneplus 6t at the mo
- Linux operating system that is compatible with a few of android phones.
  
  https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6T_(oneplus-fajita)

Purism is a fucking scam company. Look intoFairPhonre or just do what most of us do: get a Pixel and reinstall without gapps

Ah yes, Librem, 100$ aliexpress phone specs for flagship prices lol
I don't think so. They providing GNU/Linux phone and invest money into mobile development for Linux. I would not recommend buying their Librem (better buy PinePhone Pro instead if you want GNU/Linux), but they definitely not a scam company.
- I paid $2,000 for a laptop. It broke the same week it arrived. I returned it. They said they'd give me my money back.
  
  That was about a year ago. I'm still waiting for my refund. They keep say it's coming soon and won't give me an ETA.
  
  That's not a scam?
Well I got the murena one so that is a degoolged phone
- Hows the experience with the phone? What have you noticed can be used and cant as far as app usage? (Ie games, social apps, etc)

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.
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

I started daily driving a PinePhone with Mobian over two years ago, upgraded to a PinePhonePro when they first came out, and then I finally got my Librem5 about a month ago. They have come a long way. The core functions you'd expect from a phone work; calls, texts (SMS and MMS), camera (pictures and video), email, web browsing, all that works perfectly fine on my Librem5. However, I understand they are not for everyone. While there are things like twitter and mastodon clients for Linux you are not going to get a banking app for a Linux phone (for example). I just use the browser for those kinds of things though.

The things keeping me from fully migrating to Linux on mobile are apps like Uber/lyft. They don't have a web ui version, but I actually use them often. Also google maps navigation doesnt have any realistic alternative in my experience.
- Uber and lyft do have web versions you can use to use the service, however app notification services and more detail stuff on the driver are not available like it is on the app versions.
  
  For lyft: https://ride.lyft.com/
  
  For uber: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/
  
  As far as maps, i used this when i had ubuntu phone, it was pure maps running offline with osm scout server. I had to go on a browser to get the coordinates of where i wanted to go and input that on the puremaps. Its an extra step but once i saved the default locations it made it easier use.
- I have no idea how realistic this is on mobile, and it's probably not realistic at all, but have you looked into waydroid?
  
  It works great to run android apps on desktop linux.
  
  I doubt it's feasible on mobile Linux right now, but I have no idea. Might be worth exploring for your use case
- Not having apps like Uber/Lyft is a problem for a lot of people. I've ran into issues like going to events (concerts/sporting events) where they expect you to download their app to even get in the door, which is more of a societal problem then a technical one for me. I know some apps can be emulated on Linux phones but I havent played with it much so I'm not sure how well they work.
  
  I've used gnome maps with very degrees of success. Its obviously not on the level of google maps, but getting better.
How was your experience with Mobian? I had my install break like 3 different times with barely any usage / installing packages.
- I've had a great experience with Mobian. It's been a while since I distro-hopped for mobile OS's but Mobian seems to be the most stable for me.

Define user-friendly...

PostmarketOS or Mobian

I'm using a Librem 5 for about two months now very happily, but I admit its not yet for everyone.

my librem 5 just sits in my drawer, not usable as a primary smartphone IMHO.

Have the PinePhone and PP Pro. Partial to SailfishOS on both. It has the most smartphone feel if you will. Like with most the camera is pretty much a no go but I rarely use them anyway.

Do you use the PinePhone as a daily driver, or just for tinkering?
- Just for tinkering so far. I have a habit of tossing the devices aside for long periods of time when an OS breaks badly. 😁
  
  Technically SailfishOS handles most of the requirements to make the device a daily-driver-in-training. All but one of my Android devices are VoIP now. Getting away from carrier-based stuff (and saving money). At the moment there isn't really anything usable on the mobile linux side (SIP, calls via XMPP - I have JMP.chat numbers) that I am aware of. On SFOS that is. Though I can use movim via browser.
  
  Guess it is time I took the devices seriously and try to use them more regularly.
Sailfish is proprietary garbage
- Okay. 🙄

After having had a Nokia N900 they are a big disappointment. Especially from a performance standpoint. I have no idea why that is. Especially if I compare them to something like an old Raspberry Pi which can still give you a good desktop experience.

I still use my N900, basically just for ssh over wifi these days. It is so so so much better than typing on a virtual keyboard, especially in a terminal where I have keyboard shortcuts set up for home/end/pgup/pgdn/tab/etc. The original Nokia battery from 2009 is still live and kicking! The keyboard and slide form factor were great. Even the resistive touch screen, when used with the stylus, is very accurate.
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- That's my point. Compared to today's hardware that thing was just a small calculator. And still it managed to deliver snappy performance.
  
  I really miss it.

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How is the camera performance?
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The only usable distro is sailfishos, but it is not fully free software. It even has android app support.

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Did the same as you. On CalyxOS on a Pixel 5 ATM. Figured I'd circle back & try my PinePhone again at some point.

i do love my choice so far. my also came with email an cloud storage so i have taken steps to deggoole more of my life

I have a librem 5, i use it to make/receive calls and it seems to work fine, though for anything else it is too anemic. Also eats through the battery like crazy, even shut down, it slowly drains.