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.
SailfishX is a usable daily driver with decent Android app support.
BUT: you’ll have to be okay with dealing with random annoyances like:
-> Your default weather app lost the ability to get weather data.
-> Some Xperia 10 III devices lose audio after some time when using GPS. Unless you are in Finland, then you are fine. Nobody knows why.
No bc of camera proprietariness
Might this work? https://droidian.org/ another commenter mentioned it.
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.
I use postmarketos with phosh. It’s kind of viable, but it has some infrequent bugs. For example sometimes, quite rarely, the call menu may freeze after the call and not respond to touches until the reboot. The camera doesn’t work at all. But there are positive aspects, an ordinary Linux terminal and the usual convenient console programs. :)
It has sufficient list of programs: browsers (I use firefox), ebook readers, fractal (matrix), telegram, maps, that works good enough on mobile at least for my daily use.
Maemo was BAE
But we have maemo liste now. Too bad it only supports a few devices (and x86!)
Theres also sailfish which is based on meego which was supposed to be Nokia’s successor to maemo. Sailfish is quite usable and has a decent android app layer, however it only works on certain phones and you need to pay for a license to use android apps
The biggest hurdle is getting a phone that you even can install a custom ROM or different OS. 'mericans and yuropeans can get their pixels, pinephones and similars easily, other places cannot.
Every phone in europe has to have an unlockable bootloader, Although, thats useless without a custom recovery support.
fwiw: it was viable when i had the first android released to the public; it was an HTC and with debian.
Does android count?
How are all the AOSP-based OSes, like for instance GrapheneOS, not Linux distros?
There are apps made for linux that don’t work with android, and there are apps made for android that don’t work with linux. That’s enough for me to consider them different
Also android just doesn’t use the basic mainline kernel which is what most people want when they say “linux phone”
When people want “Linux” on their phones they’re talking more about the ecosystem than the OS
No, none of them are. I tried 2-3 versions of it, none is good. However, Android on the other hand, which is also linux-based, is good. Go for Murena’s e/OS, or LineageOS.
tried pmos with plasma mobile but the browsers were buggy because of my SOC having bad graphics acceleration support in the mainline kernel
No. Maybe. Why not?
Android is a Linux distro, just because its not gnu or running whatever subset of features a desktop Linux might have doesn’t make it any less of a Linux distro.
The real question is what do you consider a part of a “Linux disto” that currently isn’t available on android?
The only thing linux about android is the kernel, i wouldn’t call that a linux distro and it’s not even compatible with any others.
The only thing about Linux IS that its a kernel. Its not like BSD where all the tools get developed together and released in the same edition, Linux is a kernel, full stop. Anything built on top of the Linux kernel is a Linux distro.
Can you name something other than the kernel that would be considered an essential element of a Linux distro and not available on android or BSD?
Its always been GNU+Linux, even stallman acknowledged its a separate thing and distros without GNU or glibc do exist on desktop too.
