this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Linux Phones

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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.

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Most clients unfortunately target Android. But for things I open often I prefer to not use Waydroid.

I recently found https://github.com/lemmygtk/lemoa. I found it's usable, but not very adaptive. What do you use?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is awesome. Does it work well on a phone screen? I'm just starting to experiment with an Ubuntu Touch install and would love to have Librewolf running on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think it does. Most Linux phone OSes ship with Firefox anyways, so LibreWolf isn't much different. That said, Ubuntu Touch is its own beast. Ubuntu Touch is more like an Ubuntu/Linux based mobile OS with its own app ecosystem, though it is capable of running desktop Linux applications even if that's not its main focus. I run postmarketOS with Phosh which is a GTK/GNOME based system that uses the same application frameworks as desktop Linux and the same applications for the most part. A lot of the GNOME apps are touchscreen friendly these days and reflow to fit smaller screens/large screen scaling. There is a mobile configuration for Firefox that changes the user agent so it requests mobile versions of sites and makes some of the UI elements smaller, but personally I don't care for it. I always browsed the desktop versions of sites on my Android phone and so having a full desktop browser on Linux phone is ideal for me. I ended up writing a utility program that turns the touchscreen into a touchpad mouse so that you can use a cursor on desktop applications that don't play well with touchscreen, though most applications don't need this and work well enough with touch alone. I love having desktop applications in my pocket. I have QT Creator, VS Code, Blender, a bunch of 3D printing utilities and slicers, file manager, terminal, etc. Some are unwieldy on a phone (Blender) but others are surprisingly usable (QT Creator). My touchscreen-as-mouse program makes some of these better but I'm also hoping my next Linux phone has USB display out so I can use it with an external monitor/KB+M. My current Linux phone is a OnePlus 6T. PinePhone Pro is a good option, but I found it hard to daily drive due to the very low battery life.

Either way, I gave up on trying to truly daily drive it because I had too many issues with calls and texts. Data only it is great, but calls got dropped on the PinePhones and sometimes they would stop receiving texts due to modem disconnects. On the OnePlus 6T, modem is solid and data/texts work great but calls only work if the modem is in 2G mode as VoLTE isn't supported yet. Also, the audio configuration messes up after one call so subsequent calls often have no audio (you can't hear them but they can hear you). I've been carrying an Android phone as well as my Linux phone for a few months now after getting a second cheap SIM card so that I can have my Linux phone for applications and browsing and my Android phone pretty much just for phone stuff.