as a maker/tool user, I can vouch for that,
but it goes much further,and as an improvisational guitar player and singer, digging in and flat out going for it, generates tones and resonance that cant be done cold.
There are many simple demonstrations and tests to show this useing found objects.
I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for about 4 years. It’s usable and stable with standard software packages and can also be tweaked in the Linux way if you so need it.
Another person mentioned Ubuntu if coming from Mac. I haven’t considered it before but they’re probably right.
I was using Mac at home, but Windows at work. So moving to Mint was easy.
Ubuntu was OK on high performance hardware but when they introduced snaps nothing worked so I moved to Mint.
I thought the same originally. Then after speaking with the online chat and realising Wayne was a Queenslander, I bought one.
There’s enough people in the Matrix and Telegram channels now to know there is a real phone. Even look at the GitHub activity. It’s busy.
Yeah it is. I have the Signal app installed in Android, but I only use it to initiate the Signal setup. Then use the desktop flatpak in FuriOS as my daily driver. You can change the look of it to be similar to the mobile app and a recent change (like a week ago) has made resizing the contact list easier from a touch screen rather than having to use a mouse the first time.
The Telegram and Matrix channels have been great for people sharing tips like this.
This was the basis of how FuriLabs managed to get such good Android app integration. Obviously they’ve forked it [0] and heavily modified it, but the user experience they’ve created with this to allow Android apps on a Linux phone has been great.
My biggest question is: why haven’t you guys advertised yourselves more? I’ve heard of liberem and the pinephone but never knew you guys had a phone? With half-decent hardware and actual water proofing?? I swear if I had the disposable cash I’d have bought one (and I hope to anyway soon).
Ok, here’s a more typical question: I’ve heard your phone uses halium, what exactly is it? Some kind of hardware abstraction layer? Some people online appear to dislike it. (And googling unfortunately gives very few links that aren’t super technical.)
I'd say it just boils down to... we're not great at marketing. We're working on it but it's hard to get the word out, especially since many people are dismissive of Linux phones after having had previous experiences with incomplete devices.
Halium/libhybris are basically layers that allow us to use Android hardware drivers with a GNU/Linux userspace. Some Android bits run inside a container to provide support for peripherals. This is kinda a stop gap solution since we're working on native implementations and replacements for much of this stuff.
Some people dislike it because it's not a "pure Linux phone". But the alternative would be to ship a device that can't even place calls or take pictures, so... I think it's a good middle ground that allows us to ship something useful today.
I kinda feel bad for you guys when I first saw your site and compared it's polished look vs Pine64's here's the board schematics & community distros I thought I was looking at a scam. Your HN presence and second look at your site, blog and realising you had a Github definatly help your case! Any plans on selling repair parts or publishing pcb diagrams? Also I didn't see this on the site, whats the features on the usbc port? Learning of the Pinephone's display out was the transition from 'this maybe a way to dump Andriod/IOs' to 'pocket laptop must have now' for me.
I know I'm late to the discussion but can you comment on the hearing aid compatibility (HAC) of the phone? It's something that keeps me tethered to bigger name phones since most of the time smaller companies don't even know what that is...
I'm interested in why the linked implementation is different or enhanced. There is nothing on the readme and I guess I would need to track down a summary of the talk
Waydroid is currently focusing on desktop usage, whereas our fork focuses around usability improvements for the mobile use case specifically. There are a lot of small things that all come together - stuff like NFC passthrough, power efficiency optimizations, MPRIS support, etc. It'd be hard to condense everything into a small explanation, but it's basically been a matter of polishing rough edges.
> all the other Linux phones that have 1 hour of battery life and no app support?
... Which phones would that be? Even the original pinephone exceeds an hour and has a pretty good collection of apps even without compatibility layers.
Indeed; I have an original PinePhone (convergence edition) and the battery is not half bad while you are using it. I think the main issue has been poor software support for wake-from-suspend, which prevented the phone from saving power when not in use. I believe that these issues have been largely resolved in the latest versions of PostmarketOS, Mobian etc.
FYI, going to suspend / receiving calls during suspend / waking from suspend haven't been a general problem on the (non-Pro) PinePhone since 2021. You just have to make sure to switch to the FOSS modem firmware, and occasionally there are regressions (the most recent one being https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager... ).
Look on the bright side. Locking bootloaders has the potential to break the duopoly by driving more people towards Linux phones or other unlocked devices. The more people that move, the stronger those communities get. I've been daily driving a Furi for 3 months now and am glad to have options outside of the duopoly.
Why not consider a smart phone that has good hardware, supports VoLTE and doesn't use Android or Apple? I've been daily driving a Furi FLX1 for over a month now. You can make it as smart or dumb as you like and you can even use it to charge another phone!
