this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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I want to donate to a linux phone. I believe in linux and I want a linux phone. Maybe we can use one in very few years as a normal daily driver. It's getting closer and closer every month.

I want to donate that we get there sooner. But which project? I'm following postmarket but I'm not sure if they are the most promising. What's your stance on this? To which project would you give your money to accellerate it?

Edit: I don't want to buy a phone. I want to support the phone os devs. Sorry for the bad wording.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (3 children)

There is a commercial phone linux: SailfishOS. IMO also the most polished one.

If those fuckers at Microsoft hadn't intervened with Nokia, we might have these things on much more devices. Meego was so promising 😔

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Maemo on Nokia N900 was awesome. But even before Microsoft Nokia and Intel decided to rewrite a perfectly working phone OS from scratch and stopped development for years while trying to build Meego. At the time android didn't have multi-tasking, but on Maemo you could play a video on vlc on the background, and it kept playing while switching windows, inside the list of little windows. It used qt for ui and you could even write native looking apps in python. It had full access to the camera api, people were writing crazy scriptable camera apps for the thing, such as the frankencamera. Why would you throw away a perfectly working os and waste time trying to rewrite the exact same thing for years Nokia!? why!? it could have been an actual Linux phone revolution years ago. and no, I don't think Android is already Linux phone. fight me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

At the time android didn’t have multi-tasking

Android always had multitasking. Part of the issue with android 1 and 2 was that it didnt have any way to properly manage the task managers which lead to people installing task killers(which had utility in those days) and auto task killers(which due to how android handles caching just lead to a cycle of killing, thing popping up, killing, and etc). My g1 with a swap partition was probably my best android phone at keeping things in memory without auto killing it until I got a phone with 6gigs of ram.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Been daily driving SailfishOS for absolutely years. Originally ran it on a Nexus 4! It's by far the most polished not-Android/iOS phone OS going right now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Is sailfish OS on a libre software license?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Yes and no. The core of the OS is opensource, but the UI is proprietary. At least last time I checked.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No. The bits that make it Sailfish, the UI, are proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Then I guess I would not put muy 5 cents there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Depending on your tolerance for frustration you can daily a phone running SailfishX. But the reality of it, at least for me, is that you will be running mostly Android apps using the Android emulator.

The emulator and the relatively easy access to Android apps makes it the most promising for me.