Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. Part of the Nokia team however started their own company called Jolla and still produce smartphones running Linux, they call their OS Sailfish. (ignoring the fact that Android also uses the Linux kernel).
The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...
Just a datapoint: UK banking apps work perfectly on my Sailfish phone.
Jolla's Android emulation is unreasonably excellent, one of their technological gems. If other Linux devices ever lift off, this will be one of the killer features that Jolla can license out. (And why not? I'm absolutely in favor of vendors selling Linux software.)
As for Sailfish - it still offers the best, most consistent, simplest UI/UX of any currently available mobile device.
Edit: and I don't have to root my phone. I can SSH into it (or use the included terminal emulator with my Bluetooth keyboard) and I have access to the full Linux filesystem. For app development, there are no hoops to jump through (like Apple's developer license).
"the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems"
This is my issue. I am commonly hearing people ask "What are you, iOS or Android?" - IE as if it is inherent to the person themselves and there are only two choices.
This is scary. I love the idea of having an alternative to iOS and Android. But I also need to function within society. This shouldn't be a choice.
I took a real interest in 6 or 7 years ago, when it was first coming out. I was excited in part by how much it (as a downstream project of MeeGo) resembled Real Linux™ internally: systemd, RPM/zypper, Wayland.
It was awesome. The way it all fit together felt thoughtful and sane. The terminal environment was like a real desktop Linux userland. And the Sailfish UI was really outstanding. It was simple, uniform, and thoroughly gesture-based. That stuff felt decidedly ahead of Android and iOS at the time.
But it's basically been impossible since then to get it on flagship or even just relatively recent hardware, and getting it distributed with the unfortunate but crucial Android app runtime has been very hard to do since it's only available on commercial distributions.
It's never felt like a real option for me, at least in the US. Since I followed it more closely, I don't know where the project stands. Last I heard, they were pivoting to other markets (developing economies, business/enterprise use) that made it seem unlikely I'd ever get to have a decent Sailfish experience.
Sailfish could have been great, but Jolla apparently tried to overextend themselves making hardware and software for their products and almost died trying. It's a shame because the Jolla phone had a swappable back part and could have things like a slideout keyboard that looked really sweet. Now they're on the enterprise and government contracting grind and market their OS on their site with all the bs enterprisey jargon, with Sailfish as a community/open-source driven project being mostly an afterthought. They also have a very limited number of devices that can run android compatibility, and you need to pay for a license.
It's a shame because their UI is the only decent thing in the world of Linux phones that isn't an utter travesty that just tries to bend the Linux desktop into being a "mobile OS" that runs like absolute shit and feels really awkward to use. But the UI on Sailfish is of course the proprietary parts aside from the android emulation.
>Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo.
There is a fork called Maemo Leste [0][1] that is actually still around and updated. I have it running on a droid 4, and it works pretty well. The UI is still the same Hildon UI. Definitely a fun OS and device to play around with, and interesting in that it's the only mobile OS I'm aware of that is running Devaun.
Even just unlocking an Android device causes most to stop working. I can't even log into PayPal app, which I assume is mostly just a WebView, because my phone is unlocked. At the same time it is apparently fineI do the same thing from the browser on my phone?
> The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...
In theory its possible to run a user-land Android subsystem on Linux (and thus on Linux phones) via Anbox or Waydroid.
In practice, I've never tried this on my PinePhone since I never needed it, so I have no idea how well this works or of it works at all.
I could get by with only using banking websites in the browser. But Why does Jolla not yet support any Pixel phones? I have wanted to try it out for years, but not to the point of trying to make things work on my own.
I do not know any first world country that has a constitution that requires you accept the terms of service of Apple or Google to function as a citizen.
Guess it depends on what your standards are. You can have it everywhere from today to likely never.
Want just basic stuff, no apps store, no good camera, no good runtime on battery? Today, go get one.
Value security more than anything else? Available today.
Want a high end smart phone with proper open source Linux/Software and apps store, great camera, fast and great battery runtime? Likely never. Linux won’t get the required investment, nor will the hardware manufacturers provide the required support (no incentives). Even the Linux Desktop experience can’t properly get there in 2022.
But a proper Linux phone, say something like a PinePhone is great as a second phone.
I used to think the same thing (especially after getting a PinePhone which is nowhere near being ready for the masses) but after getting a Steam Deck, which is totally a mass-consumer ready gaming platform running (and even exposing it to the users) Linux, I think Linux Phones are just missing the right company to move forward with it. Would be much harder than building a gaming console, for sure, since hardware manufacturers of basebands/modems are really anti-OSS, but I think the time will eventually come. It'll take time though.
Inclined to say no - mainly because of the camera. The gap between ability to mechanically take a pic and what the flagships are doing with AI driven post processing seems not only big but growing.
Short of die hard linux/FOSS fans noticably worse pics is going to be an absolute show stopper
The problem is not AI - many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. The problem is that hardware vendors do not provide access to their signal processing chip's internals. It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.
> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way?
It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry.
Thus, as demonstrated for many years of failed alternatives, unfortunately buzzwords like 'privacy', 'non-free software' and 'Linux' have little to no use to gaining traction and selling to mass market in a comparable manner against the existing duopoly.
And before you say 'Android', it is has tons of closed source userland software and subsystems and will get even worse once it moves over to Fuchsia OS. Therefore 'Android' as a free software example is disqualified.
We are talking about Linux distros designed to run on phones with 'free software'.
Arch Linux ARM can be installed on Android with Termux
I run scipy and numpy on my phone with it. A bit painful because I can only see about six lines of code at a time but I wrote a few thousand lines of ML code with vim on my cell phone in the last two months.
There isn't any hope for Linux on the smartphone, at least not Linux as actually intended in the talk.
A proper solution needs to run perfectly on users' existing hardware or it won't be run at all. There are a lot of old unupdated devices which should be ripe for the picking. The only solution close to matching the OSS community's resources is the Android kernel for all of its problems. The Linux smartphone community is way too ideological (far more than even RMS was back when OSS started) to do it - they won't use Android, and their hardware would also be way behind for similar reasons.
So irrelevance it is, unless some rich sugar daddy company decides to make an entrance to the smartphone market, but I don't see any plausible contenders.
Discounting Android as "Not Linux" enough is a mind boggle to me. Perhaps not "GNU" enough, but certainly the spirit of Linux -- customized for the particular needs, stable, fast, works on a plethora of hardware, etc.
Vanilla Android or AOSP might kinda have “Linux Spirit” but I’m not sure what gets shipped on most consumer devices does… lots of random things locked down (including boot loader, sometimes), crapware all over the place, drivers and kernel changes that aren’t upstreamed making it difficult to install anything but carrier/manufacturer-flavored Android, etc.
I think most people rooting for “smartphone Linux” are looking to be able to swap and customize OSes on their phones and tablets as easily as they do on their x86 PCs without futzing around with device specific ROMs and the like.
Android is Linux but it has nowhere close to the fully open source freedom of a traditional Linux workstation. This is why I carry a tiny linux laptop.
I'm typing this comment from a Poco F1 I set up with postmarketOS and Phosh earlier this week and so far it's very promising. Will write up a proper review next week. Much better than the Pinephone so far.
You can strap Raspberry to your phone via USB and you have 100% Linux phone without restrictions. Communication happens via Phone's USB-tethering and Raspberry's Internet-via-USB (and bVNC). OTG-phone can also power the Raspberry.
I used this setup a lot, but nowadays Termux with X11-server is good enough.
Most use nowadays is photo editing with GIMP. You can gain excellent dexterity with bVNC with time.
I'd been considering working out a way to do this over Bluetooth networking for a while - have a Pi0W on a power bank in my bag, hooked up to phone over BT for when I want to test something quick on the go (ideas often happen on buses, subways, etc).
Thinking of the Pi0, I assume you would need 2 usb cables and a hub: 1 cable goes to Pi's power usb port, 1 goes to the other usb port for connectivity, then both cables joined through a hub to the phone's usb port.
Before answering that question I'd ask: why would we want that?
My answer is no, it didn't work on the desktop, it won't work on the smartphone, for more or less the same reasons.
As much as I like Linux and FOSS, Linux is just a bad OS for the average consumer.
For hackers, makers, DYI enthusiasts, etc. Linux is wonderful, however, what's the market size for a Linux smart phone for this people? I bet it's tiny.
Didn't work on the desktop? I've been running Linux exclusively on my desktops for 15 years. Desktop Linux is better today than it's ever been.
Why does every OS need to be suitable for average consumers? Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side, and projects like PostmarketOS are doing great work on the software side. These are niche products for motivated enthusiasts, as they should be. They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.
Why is it 'just bad'? I have installed Linux (either Debian or Ubuntu) for several non-tech-savvy family members, and they have used them for years without incident. I once talked to my mom about Linux and she mentioned that her Windows worked great for everything, she would never change. I told her to look at the splash screen when she booted up ;)! She had been on Linux for a good 10 years without noticing.
Maybe we can do it backwards this time, take the Chrome approach with Linux, build a UI launcher for mobile that is as simple as possible and once it's complex and has a healthy touch-friendly apps translate it to desktop.
Look at Steam Deck and what they've done. They could use the same approach to launch a Phone OS.
My older relatives tend to disagree with you, Ubuntu runs better than Windows and is easier to use (especially on dated hardware). Admittedly if proprietary programs were a requirement it wouldn't be possible, but that isn't a fault of Linux.
Right now Apple can pre-load Apple TV and Apple Music on all their devices, put it on the top of their store and search results, make all deep links go to their services and charge all other services a 30% fee even for in-app subscriptions making it a hassle for users to sign up to competitors.
Spotify, Netflix, Valve, etc. should all see the importance of having a fully open platform especially now that phones are far more common than laptops or desktops. And governments too given they want us to have digital ID, digital banking and digital inbox services for filing taxes, COVID passes, etc.
Popos works really well on the desktop. All of the games that I play run perfectly on linux, albeit with slightly higher resource usage. Couple that with a windows 10 vm and there is no reason for me to boot into my windows installation ever again.
Around 2002-03 - Motorola had RT Linux in EZx range of touch phones (https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a760-392.php). They were also working on a Linux based smartphone platform which was fairly advanced before scrapping it in 2004. Been a part of those teams. Do not think it is easy to introduce another smartphone platform right now without strong differentiation given the network effects. Something on wearables might still work.
A typical Linux distro ISO is about 2Gb in size and this distro has all the necessary drivers and hardware devices to run on thousands of different computers with different configurations.
Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel.
Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all the mobile phone models, just like what Linux does for computers?
Then we could have a universal AOSP distro for phones
Because mobile (basically ARM) is not a standardized platform like the PC. PC architecture has dozens of interoperability standards the entire PC ecosystem adheres to. Everything from boot up, to DMA controllers, to protocols for device capability discovery, and more .. You can think of each ARM board as its own bespoke platform (needing it's own device tree/bsp).
The talk explains that - you could make an universal AOSP image that works on mainlined devices, so you could support the whole handful of them at this moment.
I think it's time we take a descriptivist view of "Linux", because there is some hard-to-describe way that Android isn't "Linuxy". If a good mobile graphical BSD OS appeared from nowhere , we might consider it "Linuxy-er" than Android.
The presentation does a good job of explaining what is missing for a good "Linux smartphone ".
I honestly don't get the idea of having a dozen distros. I understand that this is how things on desktop for decades are, but it seems grossly irrelevant. Also, things on desktop are not very good too, to be honest.
There's one Android and there are dosens of variations on top of that, not parallel to that. This is how userbase is gained.
[+] [-] z3t4|3 years ago|reply
The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...
[+] [-] fractallyte|3 years ago|reply
Jolla's Android emulation is unreasonably excellent, one of their technological gems. If other Linux devices ever lift off, this will be one of the killer features that Jolla can license out. (And why not? I'm absolutely in favor of vendors selling Linux software.)
As for Sailfish - it still offers the best, most consistent, simplest UI/UX of any currently available mobile device.
Edit: and I don't have to root my phone. I can SSH into it (or use the included terminal emulator with my Bluetooth keyboard) and I have access to the full Linux filesystem. For app development, there are no hoops to jump through (like Apple's developer license).
Mobile Linux is already here, and it works!
[+] [-] _carbyau_|3 years ago|reply
This is my issue. I am commonly hearing people ask "What are you, iOS or Android?" - IE as if it is inherent to the person themselves and there are only two choices.
This is scary. I love the idea of having an alternative to iOS and Android. But I also need to function within society. This shouldn't be a choice.
[+] [-] pxc|3 years ago|reply
It was awesome. The way it all fit together felt thoughtful and sane. The terminal environment was like a real desktop Linux userland. And the Sailfish UI was really outstanding. It was simple, uniform, and thoroughly gesture-based. That stuff felt decidedly ahead of Android and iOS at the time.
But it's basically been impossible since then to get it on flagship or even just relatively recent hardware, and getting it distributed with the unfortunate but crucial Android app runtime has been very hard to do since it's only available on commercial distributions.
It's never felt like a real option for me, at least in the US. Since I followed it more closely, I don't know where the project stands. Last I heard, they were pivoting to other markets (developing economies, business/enterprise use) that made it seem unlikely I'd ever get to have a decent Sailfish experience.
[+] [-] nyx_land|3 years ago|reply
It's a shame because their UI is the only decent thing in the world of Linux phones that isn't an utter travesty that just tries to bend the Linux desktop into being a "mobile OS" that runs like absolute shit and feels really awkward to use. But the UI on Sailfish is of course the proprietary parts aside from the android emulation.
[+] [-] anthonyhn|3 years ago|reply
There is a fork called Maemo Leste [0][1] that is actually still around and updated. I have it running on a droid 4, and it works pretty well. The UI is still the same Hildon UI. Definitely a fun OS and device to play around with, and interesting in that it's the only mobile OS I'm aware of that is running Devaun.
[0] https://maemo-leste.github.io/
[1] Technically a fork of Maemo, the predecessor to MeeGo.
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|3 years ago|reply
In theory its possible to run a user-land Android subsystem on Linux (and thus on Linux phones) via Anbox or Waydroid.
In practice, I've never tried this on my PinePhone since I never needed it, so I have no idea how well this works or of it works at all.
[1] https://anbox.io/
[2] https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid
[+] [-] sgc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrvick|3 years ago|reply
I do not know any first world country that has a constitution that requires you accept the terms of service of Apple or Google to function as a citizen.
[+] [-] neverrroot|3 years ago|reply
But a proper Linux phone, say something like a PinePhone is great as a second phone.
[+] [-] capableweb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
Short of die hard linux/FOSS fans noticably worse pics is going to be an absolute show stopper
[+] [-] johndough|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zekica|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry.
Thus, as demonstrated for many years of failed alternatives, unfortunately buzzwords like 'privacy', 'non-free software' and 'Linux' have little to no use to gaining traction and selling to mass market in a comparable manner against the existing duopoly.
And before you say 'Android', it is has tons of closed source userland software and subsystems and will get even worse once it moves over to Fuchsia OS. Therefore 'Android' as a free software example is disqualified.
We are talking about Linux distros designed to run on phones with 'free software'.
[+] [-] orangepurple|3 years ago|reply
I run scipy and numpy on my phone with it. A bit painful because I can only see about six lines of code at a time but I wrote a few thousand lines of ML code with vim on my cell phone in the last two months.
https://github.com/SDRausty/termux-archlinux/
[+] [-] yyyk|3 years ago|reply
A proper solution needs to run perfectly on users' existing hardware or it won't be run at all. There are a lot of old unupdated devices which should be ripe for the picking. The only solution close to matching the OSS community's resources is the Android kernel for all of its problems. The Linux smartphone community is way too ideological (far more than even RMS was back when OSS started) to do it - they won't use Android, and their hardware would also be way behind for similar reasons.
So irrelevance it is, unless some rich sugar daddy company decides to make an entrance to the smartphone market, but I don't see any plausible contenders.
[+] [-] NuSkooler|3 years ago|reply
Discounting Android as "Not Linux" enough is a mind boggle to me. Perhaps not "GNU" enough, but certainly the spirit of Linux -- customized for the particular needs, stable, fast, works on a plethora of hardware, etc.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
I think most people rooting for “smartphone Linux” are looking to be able to swap and customize OSes on their phones and tablets as easily as they do on their x86 PCs without futzing around with device specific ROMs and the like.
[+] [-] nivenkos|3 years ago|reply
The Steam Deck does this perfectly!
[+] [-] lrvick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notmyaccountt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddevault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elagost|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timonoko|3 years ago|reply
I used this setup a lot, but nowadays Termux with X11-server is good enough.
Most use nowadays is photo editing with GIMP. You can gain excellent dexterity with bVNC with time.
[+] [-] nibbleshifter|3 years ago|reply
Might tinker with it this evening.
[+] [-] axytol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makz|3 years ago|reply
My answer is no, it didn't work on the desktop, it won't work on the smartphone, for more or less the same reasons.
As much as I like Linux and FOSS, Linux is just a bad OS for the average consumer.
For hackers, makers, DYI enthusiasts, etc. Linux is wonderful, however, what's the market size for a Linux smart phone for this people? I bet it's tiny.
[+] [-] aquaduck|3 years ago|reply
Why does every OS need to be suitable for average consumers? Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side, and projects like PostmarketOS are doing great work on the software side. These are niche products for motivated enthusiasts, as they should be. They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.
[+] [-] sgc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bilal_io|3 years ago|reply
Look at Steam Deck and what they've done. They could use the same approach to launch a Phone OS.
[+] [-] type0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olau|3 years ago|reply
There are commercial vendors like Canonical where you can get support, if you want to.
Now, 20 years ago we could have argued about application support, etc., but these days average consumers just fire up a web browser.
[+] [-] nivenkos|3 years ago|reply
Right now Apple can pre-load Apple TV and Apple Music on all their devices, put it on the top of their store and search results, make all deep links go to their services and charge all other services a 30% fee even for in-app subscriptions making it a hassle for users to sign up to competitors.
Spotify, Netflix, Valve, etc. should all see the importance of having a fully open platform especially now that phones are far more common than laptops or desktops. And governments too given they want us to have digital ID, digital banking and digital inbox services for filing taxes, COVID passes, etc.
[+] [-] bhedgeoser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuraj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimensionc132|3 years ago|reply
Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel.
Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all the mobile phone models, just like what Linux does for computers?
Then we could have a universal AOSP distro for phones
[+] [-] faisalhackshah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lynndotpy|3 years ago|reply
The presentation does a good job of explaining what is missing for a good "Linux smartphone ".
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|3 years ago|reply
There's one Android and there are dosens of variations on top of that, not parallel to that. This is how userbase is gained.
[+] [-] jqpabc123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjtrowbridge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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