The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
They’re selling it for the same price as the outgoing model despite tons of bullshit tariffs being levied against them. What an achievement!
I want a Linux phone that works, and I want to support a world where Linux phones exist and are financially viable to make, therefore I will buy this as my next phone.
My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.
I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.
postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.
If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.
And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.
I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,
That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.
Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)
Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)
It is not nor should it be a showstopper. A functioning device that can be widely used helps build eg an app ecosystem. That part needs to exist and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hallium or not.
I guess I might agree, so long as that ecosystem is shared with Purism Librem 5 (a potentially sustainable device, if not affordable), and so long as a more affordable but also sustainable device (which means non-Hallium) will actually appear in response to this ecosystem stimulus.
At all times during the ecosystem stimulus, someone has to be keeping an eye on the real goal. Which is getting those affordable, trustworthy, sustainable hardware devices to become available.
(I've seen Linux handheld/phone projects fail for ~25 years, wasted lots of time and money on them, and would be happy to see something solve the hard problem of open drivers.)
> Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?)
Go lurk in their Matrix chat. They've noted in there that they didn't exactly have a ton of choice in stuff like this because you don't really get a ton of options as a small operation.
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
My Librem 5's camera is fully functioning just fine. Many entries in that table are either outdated or pmOS-specific, or marked as "partial" because they require some tiny manual intervention that's not a big deal in practice.
The pictures I shoot on my Librem 5 look nothing like the (pretty good) ones that you regularly post to the Fediverse. My photos are just a faded, grey, blurred, grainy mess. I can take the time and manually set focus (autofocus never works) but the manual focus slider and button are so difficult to read that by the time I figure out whether or not the slider is enabled, the photo opportunity is long gone.
When I look at your photos, I often wonder what I might be doing differently than you. But after two years of daily driving my Librem 5, I decided to no longer care, and just stopped making photos altogether.
I am taking photos with regular Millipixels from PureOS Byzantium like everyone else, without setting anything manually aside of triggering the autofocus sequence when necessary (in the latest version it can be triggered by simply tapping the preview; previously you had to cycle the "auto" button). The only thing that I do differently is how I turn the raw DNG file into a JPEG: see https://gitlab.com/dos1/glowup and https://source.puri.sm/-/snippets/1223
I think that's because Sebastian develops software for the Librem 5 and thus is likely not running a stock PureOS Byzantium.
I managed to get similar results in my holidays in late August(on postmarketOS 25.06 with Millipixels 0.23.0 and a patched kernel [1]).
Please note that I just used the Librem 5 as my "mainline Linux camera" and have not had a SIM in it in a while, and thus can't comment on how well postmarketOS 25.06 would work for daily driving.
The only major thing these kernel changes introduce is RAW10 support, which helps photos with high dynamic range that would have visible banding in the shadows otherwise. There are more changes, but their effects are either subtle or unrelated to still photos. Most of the pictures I post have been taken without these changes, only some of the most recent ones used them.
>(in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else)
Nit: The Pine64 PinePhone's cameras at least have been fully functional since 2021. It's a very shitty pair of cameras, but they're definitely fully functional.
I know the wiki.postmarketos.org page for it says the camera support is "Partial" and that a bunch of drivers are out-of-tree. This and much of the rest of the page is extremely outdated, and I (maintainer) just haven't had the time to go through that page and fix it up.
I'm not a PostmarketOS user (I prefer Mobian), but thanks for maintaining the PmOS Pinephone port. It's thanks to people like you that real Linux distros on phones can continue to work and get better.
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all
From what I have been able to tell, the folks behind Furilabs are also behind Droidian, which is Halium/libhybrys based. Furilabs/FuriOS is the commercial version of it.
> postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers
this is why halium exists. OEMs don't produce drivers beyond whatever kernel they ship with, so this is an attempt to build a system that leverages the crap they do ship.
> why stop at the OS?
Because the OS is the only thing you control. The reason the Librem 5 costs so much for a decade-old platform is because they didn't grab a predesigned device from another OEM. Doing everything yourself is going to be the only way to produce a first-class linux phone.
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
I wish usb cameras were sold in the same form-factor as phone thermal cameras. Then the missing drivers for the built-in cameras wouldn't matter as much.
I doubt the market is nig enough, but I know at least a few people who I'm sure would buy a phone that was actually as thin as the new iPhone Mini pretends to be without the camera bump, then have a USB C camera attachment for the rare occasion they need to take a photo.
No: this would allow such cameras to be internally connected to a custom-built phone via USB, but without the connector, oor using a tiny connector. Think Framework laptop peripherals, only built-in
Once you have the camera-controlling binary blob separated in an MCU behind a USB interface, you can run a modern kernel (maybe not even Linux), without running the binary blob in it.
I think the crucial issue here is Android app compatibility. Desktop Linux programs aren't suited for use on mobile devices; the experience is inevitably poor. Android compatibility is claimed, but no information beyond that is provided. If this device does not run at the very least any app that does not depend on Google Play, e.g. apps from F-Droid, it's dead on arrival. In that case, you are much better off with a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Graphene is very polished and has 100% compatibility with Android. Everything just works and the user experience is as good as an official Android device, only free of Google spyware.
>I thought there was a robust android emulator for linux such that I could run android apps - and call an Uber or whatever - from desktop linux ...
There are some but not really great and it will become impossible very soon with remote attestation and play integrity. Already Uber is one of the few apps that have the hardware attestation keys for grapheneos manually added.
In my experience, Waydroid works very well actually. The question is whether it wouldn't just be simpler and better to use AOSP (or Graphene) as the OS for these phones. In principle, a "Linux phone" sounds great, until you realize that there are close to zero Linux programs that are actually usable on a small touch display. The Android project already has done the hard work of adapting Linux to mobile devices and FOSS apps are plentiful and polished. The problem with the common variety of Android phones is control by Google, not the underlying tech.
Fair enough, but how many of these are as polished as their Android counterparts? How many are still actively maintained and will be for the foreseeable future? Android already is "Linux for mobile devices" and has all the features people expect from a phone. Reinventing the wheel on the software side seems counterproductive when what we need is simply more hardware to run Android on. I wish Furi collaborated with Graphene or Lineage and released a proper FLOSS Android device instead of going the "desktop Linux" route.
Wait, many people are complaining that PC applications and websites are designed with a touch screen / mobile in mind... Think about the UI, huge spacing, etc. So which is it?
Yeah everything works except payment, and banking apps, and probably some other stuff. Considering Google's policy direction this isn't going to improve sadly
To be precise, there's an Android API called Play Integrity that defines a device's integrity. This integrity can be STRONG, DEVICE, BASIC, and no integrity.
GrapheneOS can only pass a check for BASIC integrity. It cannot pass a check for DEVICE or STRONG integrity.
STRONG integrity is hardware-backed (think TPM) and is not spoofable. DEVICE integrity can be spoofed and there are tools to do it, if you root your device, but Graphene does not want to this for various reasons. [1]
It is up to the developer of every app to choose to use this API or not, and to lock some or all of the features of their app behind this API.
GrapheneOS actually supports hardware integrity (the STRONG variant), but in a particular way. Every OS integrity API (including eg. Secure Boot) is based on a list of master keys, that are installed with every computer. Users that want to install custom operating system that are not signed by a major company will have to enroll their own keys into the Secure Boot system.
Hardware integrity also requires root keys, and those are owned by Google. But the API is actually general enough to allow both a "Verified" (signed by a root Google key) and "SelfSigned" custom keys. GrapheneOS provides a guide [2] that describes how to adapt the hardware integrity checks to accept either a Verified key or a SelfSigned key from a list of keys from GrapheneOS.
There is no reason why app developers should not accept operating systems signed by GrapheneOS just like those signed by Google, for the simple reason that it provides the exact same anti-tamper protection.
Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.
[1]: "they use fingerprinting techniques such as GPU fingerprinting and send along that data, which enables detecting and banning spoofing. It is NOT practical to pretend to pass these checks. It is only possible in the short term at a small scale. It will get banned and stop working."
>Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.
This is the stated reason, but the behavior of it is anything but: if they really cared, they would fail massively outdated versions of android that have critical remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, but they do not. It is also much easier to tamper with a ROM slightly and have a version that passes these checks, compared to having a secure, up-to-date, maintainable ROM that passes.
You can't use Google Pay obviously if the phone is de-Googled. That's a good thing IMO, the last thing I want is Google tracking how I spend my money. Carrying a credit card in a wallet case with my phone is a very minor inconvenience.
The Bank of America app runs on Graphene without issues however. So generally speaking it is not true that banking apps don't run on de-Googled phones. Here it is the developers that are to blame if they enforce compliance with Google's requirements and don't stick to the basic FOSS version of the OS.
And let's be honest, it's not like there hasn't been spent a decade or more, with thousands of developers working tirelessly on making Android as good as it is today. Like linux laptops not burning up immediately is itself a change upstreamed from android development, but that's just half of the story.
A mobile OS fundamentally needs a different application model -- apps can't just decide to run whenever they like. How will desktop GIMP know that it shouldn't waste my battery when in the background (unless it very specially requests it throuhg an API made just for that)? Does suspending it work as you expect? For how long will you suspend it, shouldn't you kill it as well after a while? Who saves stuff?
I can't help but feel that anyone strongly advocating for a GNU Linux phone (because let's be honest, Android is the linux phone) is just not familiar with the actual context of what it entails.
I maintain a project [1] that tries to collect and track them all, and ... at least for keeping track of how they all develop, there's not a few apps. ;-)
You currently list 720 apps, Google Play Store has 3.3 million.
Even if we assume that a good chunk of that may be "duplicate" in terms of functionality (e.g. todo apps), that is still just a completely different dimension of apps and use cases covered by android natively.
I don't recommend using the vast majority of mobile apps, which exist for data-mining and addiction-maintenance purposes. Android is specifically known as the worst ecosystem in this regard. Browsers continue to work, despite the corporate push to dark patterns.
It's Linux, if you need something you or someone else will eventually write it. But first there needs to be acceptable, working hardware. Enter the FLX1/s, and we come full circle.
Sure, the majority of mobile apps suck. But even then, 1% of it is still orders of magnitude larger than the number of "Linux" apps, and there are surely more actually decent mobile apps than that.
Besides, open-source doesn't have to be GNU, there are a bunch of open source apps on F-Droid.
I also reject non-free apps whose main purpose is to snoop on their users like Facebook. But what about dozens of FOSS projects like Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Nextcloud, KeePass and many others? All of these have polished clients that work perfectly on Android and provide an experience that rivals or surpasses commercial offerings. They took years to develop and I don't expect Linux phone versions will ever be released because of the chicken and egg problem. You can emulate these apps with Waydroid on a Linux device, but you will almost certainly lose some features like GPS access or notifications. At the end of the day, you will mainly be running Android apps anyway, free or non-free, so you are better off with an Android device in the first place.
I currently use 0 Android apps, so honestly believe one could survive without them.
I'm glad Waydroid is a thing for folks that are, and sorry attestation prevents full compatibility. But neither issue should get in the way of investment in modern Linux phones, which I've been desperately waiting for, for years.
Web apps are still a thing as well, believe it or not.
It doesn't run Debian, it runs (a fork of) Droidian which relies on Android layer underneath. There are other Linux phones that do actually run Debian and don't rely on Android.
I think seba_dos1 refers to PureOS [0] (for the Librem 5; PureOS is essentially a FSF-endorsed Debian) and Mobian [1]. Both use a close-to-mainline kernel, Mobian's goal is to "bring Debian to mobile devices. Over time, the idea is to minimize the Mobian specific pieces by “upstreaming” customization to the original projects."
True. This seems like an amazing device especially given the total B.S Google and Apple have been throwing at us. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it were available in my country.
Then why do all photos of this phone show the logo, not the actual OS it’s running? If it’s running something that is not Android, I would expect a page how the OS actually looks and works before considering it a serious, working alternative to Android.
I think just like "Made in the US," a lot of people say they want one, but most really don't, due to either price, hardware, and/or software drawbacks.
Phone UI paradigm isn't as easy as "Let's just scale down the Desktop/Tablet applications". In case of Sailfish OS development history, migration from clunky, but closer to Desktop, Hildon framework of Maemo 5 to purpose-built Qt applications of Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan was obvious quality boost. Same with webOS and UBports: app ecosystem starting from scratch within their corresponding "DE"s. If convergence-style cross-device applications were somewhat easily achievable, that would've happened in the early 2010s (Windows Phone / Windows RT? Ubuntu Touch getting more attention from investors?). It's the same story why Android Tablets suck and iPadOS doesn't, but in other direction.
And/or, it's a simple matter of time/money being spent on streamlining the experience. It's not like Sailfish OS is perfect (Qt6 migration is way overdue), but Jolla has already figured out lots of integration details which will become teething problems for Droidian and such. Including, but not limited to VoLTE support.
I'm not convinced that convergent UI works either. The needs of desktop and mobile just differ too greatly.
That doesn't mean that the two can't be served by the same UI framework, but at minimum you need two sets of widgets and separate desktop/mobile layouts in order to not either make the desktop experience dumbed down or end up with a mobile experience that's awkward to use with touch.
The padding and control size in GNOME feels completely goofy on a desktop machine for example and reduces the usability of 12"-13" laptops with how much space is eaten up by blank space.
> I'm not convinced that convergent UI works either. The needs of desktop and mobile just differ too greatly.
For the record, I agree. But I've been playing with Apple's new Liquid Glass UI on macOS / iOS and I think they've done a pretty good job of defining platform-agnostic UI primitives and layouts with some platform-specific rules when needed.
It's a big redesign that covers desktop / mobile / tablet / TV. They did a pretty clever job of it, though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
I've been seeing this myself since I use several Apple products, and while parts are done well…
> though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
This is the part that makes it not work. The Liquid Glass transition isn't the only thing that's negatively impacted desktop UI in macOS, but also the several revisions of iOS-7-like flat designs since 10.10 Yosemite with a slow but constant march of papercuts. So even in the prior version (Sequoia), a great deal of damage had already been done. Tahoe's Liquid Glass compares less favorably against the much more "desktoppy" 10.9 Mavericks.
Trust me, I'm with you 100%. I weep for the Mac OS X we used to have.
I'm just trying to look at it from Apple's eyes. From their perspective, I think, they're trying to design a UI framework that exists beyond any particular device form factor. UI design in the abstract, where specific platforms are particular manifestations of their Platonic UI ideal.
So you have something of a broad convergence of macOS / iOS / iPadOS / visionOS / etc. design elements, like rounded application windows, UI widgets (button/toolbar/...), ecosystem stuff (app widgets, live activities), and Apple technologies (Control Center, Spotlight, Siri, notifications).
Layout is (mostly) grouped relative to display size, not interaction method (like touch v. mouse). Similar display sizes have similar application layouts. Large = (macOS, visionOS, tvOS, iPadOS), medium = (iOS, iPadOS [small devices], CarPlay), small = (Apple Watch). Large display layouts tend to have the menu bar, toolbars, and side bars.
I could go on but it's getting late. This might be a half-baked idea, but I'm pretty sure this is more-or-less how Apple is approaching their platforms now with the Liquid Glass redesign.
> Phone UI paradigm isn't as easy as "Let's just scale down the Desktop/Tablet applications".
Have you tried modern Gnome/GTK+ 4 applications? You can resize the window to a tiny size and it seamlessly "scales down" to a phone layout. Very handy even on a desktop. Yes, there are real differences besides size (phone UI needs a lot of inactive padding around tap areas because finger taps are imprecise; it greatly prefers swipes to taps, while a pointer-based UI prefers clicks to drag'n'drop; phone UI needs long taps as a secondary action, etc.) but they're minor in the grand scheme of things.
You mean modern in the sense that is no designer any longer, one has to code everything manually, and the designer that was going to be done, was based on Web technologies?
I somehow agree with this statement too. Although I don't dislike current GNOME, I think Mer Linux (SailfishOS and Nemo) as well as its predecesors (MeeGo and Maemo) are much more pleasant to use on a small screen. The others don't look very optimized for that usecase. Actually, MeeGo, as shipped in a Nokia N9, was in many aspects the most elegant mobile UI I've ever seen.
I saw dang's comment of praise here for your post, which is meant to highlight "hackers" bringing something new to the market. Got it, but your post's comments of praise is vacuous if you don't own one and speak from first-hand knowledge. How can you praise it as a phone "that actually works" if you don't own one?
> The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
It’s funny because excessive negativity is peak HN (see: Dropbox post) but yeah, it’s amazing how many people are focused on how this couldn’t/doesn’t work than got it could/does.
I bought 4 Firefox phones, am itching for hardware that I truly own in the age of AI, and I’m ready to be hurt again.
Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Edit: If you notice that this does not match with another comment I've made saying I wouldn't buy this because of the size, I can only offer as a defence that I'm also trying to vote with my wallet about the size of phones so I'm torn.
I think it's probably better on balance to have a small phone that does everything that it should perfectly, and live with the compromise of living with the walled garden, while still being small to easily hold and encourage me to go and use a more appropriate device than something I've pulled from my pocket for any task that requires staring at a screen.
> Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Good news, it’s not too late, I still have 2 FX0s and 2 others (jk but if you’re in Tokyo maybe not jk)
Also not sure I was doing God’s work, the second app (PWA) I made for FirefoxOS was a Tinder clone using their undocumented API
And definitely no problem with people not buying, not everyone is a first adopter and that’s fine (I’m not either).
That said a slightly too large phone is probably not a high price to pay for appreciably more freedom, just my 2c
> This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
"Shut up and take my mo... 170mm x 76 mm, 201g? Sigh - never mind!"
Sorry for adding one more awful comment. If they make a mini version, I will absolutely put my money where my mouth is.
That is a vanishingly low bar, apparently. We don't need to praise something just because it is FOSS. With it's quite old hardware and limited software it instantly becomes unattractive for many.
That was always the challenge for computer phones, to get the phone part of the phone work. There's been many Wi-Fi only PDAs, non-calling data cards for those, non-calling but cellular-enabled ones, etc. before iOS/Android happened.
I'm glad for this release but I think users are cynical because of the state of things since the Pinephone and Purism releases. There had been what felt like very little progress towards a "daily driver" device. Mind you I think Sailfish has shown it's doable a long time, but this is cast aside for being paid.
Your comment is a good example of a corrective post, and the upvotes are deserved, but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality. On the internet, everybody needs something to object to!
> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.
Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.
Sometimes it seems like half the comment sections (but probably more like 20% lol) have a "what is wrong with all of you" as the top-rated comment, and I have to scroll way down, 5 or 10 top-level comments, before I find an example that it was referring to. It seems to get more votes by dramatizing the "going against the mainstream", when really it is the mainstream. (Which is kinda sad, but not really the worst thing in world, probably a perennial part of human society ...)
Why do none of the modern phones have a flat back? It's crazy to me that seemingly everyone is jumping on the train to have the camera stick out from the back. I guess the camera lens needs more space, but why not then add some additional material so it's still even? I feel like I'm missing something obvious, do people not put down their phone on flat surfaces or something?
This! Just add those 1-2mm and stuff bigger battery in there… (and make it more rugged so most likely no need for additional cover that is even more bulky)
probably unpopular opinion but Nokia Lumia had awesome design - they use polycarbons so they case wasn't unpleaseant to touch and had this "rubbery" feelings and was not slippery...
The Sony 10 vii that launched yesterday for 450€ has a grippy back according to reviewers, and the Fairphone 6 I've found has plastic as well (battery is removable so the back needs to come off reasonably, not like these horrible two-micron glass panes)
The problem with most of these soft-touch plastics is they are incompletely polymerized and will eventually disintegrate into a sticky mess you need to strip off to get to the hard plastic they are painted on. Silicone doesn't, but it's seldom used as a coating.
While your comment makes sense if you were commenting on an Apple or Samsung phone, but this is a Linux phone. We should be glad there are Linux phones being made available at all and the smallest problem is if there is a camera bump or not.
I hope one day comes when the biggest issue with a Linux phone is a camera bump or some other mechanical detail.
Or make it in a wedge shape? This may sound crazy, but in 2012, I had a Samsung phone (maybe a Galaxy Nexus -- can't remember exacly). It had different thicknesses at the bottom and the top, and a smooth curvature in between that was pleasing to the hand. The display too, was ever so slightly curved, not enough to fit the contours of a human cheek as you held it up, but just enough to not feel like you're pressing a glass slab to your face.
I actually find a bump better for putting your phone down on a flat surface, and my logic is this:
If your camera lens is flat to the body of the phone, it's more prone to being scratched on a table. With a bump, the lens becomes slightly elevated as the phone balances between the bottom of the case and the edge of the bottom of the camera bump, giving the lens(es) a tiny clearance
I generally agree with your sentiment, but of all the phones I've seen with unwieldy overbites hanging out the back, this is one where the protrusion is small enough that I could live with.
If Apple with their trillions of dollars decided that their new phone should be a thinner one, it tells us that the general public for some reason likes it.
Pixel phones have a bump that stretches from left to right, so it leans on a flat surface slightly tilted up, but still stable. Unlike phone that have the bump on a corner only and will move if you tap it.
But is it really thin if there are parts that are thicker? The "depth" or whatever should be measured where it's thicker, not thinnest.
I guess I'm too much of an office worker to get that most people have their phones in their pocket, as soon as I sit down at my desk the phone gets placed on the desk.
I will always have a case that has a cut-out for the camera so it still lays flat and it's otherwise thinner (or the case is thicker and thus more protective) than it would be if the camera didn't stick out slightly
Now your phone is a lot heavier, thicker where it's being held by hands, and the battery lasts longer than anyone needs since we all sleep next to a power outlet at night.
It's funny to me how this thread is a demonstrator of this phenomenon where a tiny minority of enthusiasts think that companies selling tens of millions of units don't know what they're doing. You think Apple and Samsung haven't tried giving focus groups thick and even phones?
The camera bump is at worst a marketing feature for the feature that customers value most.
I would also like to point out that back in the Nokia PureView 808/Lumia 1020 days, enthusiasts thought that big camera bumps were a cool thing. The fact that your Nokia had a real camera with a real xenon flash bulb made it better than the competition.
Hopefully it's the base Debian with a thin vendor package set (kernel, u-boot, DTBs, firmware, out-of-tree DKMS, and a Halium-based bridge to HALs) tied together by a meta-package. With apt pinning, upgrades would become normal Debian transactions, security updates would track Debian, and the vendor layer stays limited to an LTS kernel delta, boot bits, and a small Halium shim.
Droidian is effectively what you describe. It's the closest feasible thing to Debian, packaged as a Project Treble GSI (so yes, it needs Halium since it coexists with the device-specific kernel build and the usual AOSP early boot environment).
My first time hearing of this and I'm very interested.
Does anyone know if it can run a full desktop mode when docked? Windows phones and some Samsung phones used to be able to do this and it was a neat trick.
I would love to have a phone I could hook up to a hotel TV with a keyboard and use like a lite desktop
> "USB-C 2.0" in the specs reveals that. DisplayPort Alt Mode requires at least USB 3.0, the PinePhone Pro would be a Linux phone supporting that.
That's not quite accurate IMHO, as the OG PinePhone also supports the feature, despite being USB 2.0. The fact that PINE64 only got it working in PinePhone hardware revision 1.2a maybe also reveals why few phones (whether they support USB 2 or 3.*, e.g., the Pixel 8 was the first Pixel phone to support the feature) actually support DisplayPort Alt Mode: It does not just add cost for parts, but also makes the design more complicated (and may require multiple design iterations to get right, which are expensive).
So: If DisplayPort Alt Mode or somthing like "USB-C video out" is not mentioned, you can usually safely assume that the device does not support it.
It's probably usable, but dips down below what even extra-cheap Xiaomis and such offer. I really want to see a Linux phone's specsheet that's even a little competitive.
I've always considered it a benefit if they don't spend needless money and waste my battery life on rendering more pixels than I'll ever see.
My eyesight hasn't gotten better and as a teenager the 720p pixel density of the phablet called Galaxy Note 2 was already smaller than I can make out during normal use (i.e. not if I'm actively trying to see if I can make them out)
But sure, higher number sells better, no matter if this actually makes any difference to anyone
If it were just that "higher number sells better" reasoning then it wouldn't make sense the density increases had a pretty hard stop after ~2014. Same with why 8k TV hype died down but 4k TV became mainstream - it's about the genuine limit for a typical person at typical TV viewing distance unless they have an absolutely massive TV.
I always thought Samsung had a clever approach with a toggle to just render at the lower resolution if you wanted the lower rendering load. Then you still only need to develop 1 cutting edge screen with all of the latest improvements but it will please both use cases well as the cost overhead of shipping models 2 separate screens would.
> why 8k TV hype died down but 4k TV became mainstream
People also stop getting eight kids the generation after child mortality plummets. The experience I had until 1080p on computer screens (not 6 inch phones) is that it added sharpness in video reproduction. I can't tell you why people then went for 4k, besides speculating it's the same phenomenon. We've also got a 4k TV simply because there was no additional cost for the featureset we were looking for anyway, and it was the biggest TV we've ever had so it didn't sound weird to have more pixels in it, but indeed, now that I own it, I can say there was no point and I'll not upgrade to a higher pixel density if there were to be a price difference or other downside (like how power draw would show up on the energy label)
Regarding the Samsung rendering thing, is that on TVs specifically? Because I don't think I've noticed that on my Samsung phones, where the impact ought to be more noticeable than for a wall-powered device
> But sure, higher number sells better, no matter if this actually makes any difference to anyone
I'm not sure if I'd call it "making a difference", but I've noticed pixelation at one point on my 5.2" 1080p phone (424 ppi). I'm absolutely not the average person, sure, but higher resolutions are markedly nicer for me. A 16" 4k laptop is significantly crispier than my 13.5" 1500ish p framework screen. Yet you will find people who say that 4k below a 28" monitor size makes no sense.
It's all about how sensitive your eyes are and how much you lean towards the screen like a poorly postured crustacean lol
I agree it won't be awful by any means, but it's relatively meaningless to directly compare DPIs of screens which have different typical viewing distances.
Why do they keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? Our hands don't grow that fast, most adult males have been struggling using their phone with one hand. Only the vocal minority prefers to oversized phone-computer, most of us just want to use it briefly on the go before tucking it back into the pocket, without it tearing a hole in it (which my last two phones have done).
If anyone is listening -- can you put a cap on the dimensions? 5.5" screen is plenty, if I want the cinema experience I will either a) go to cinema or b) use some VR/AR device, for the rest of use cases, like watching a movie on a bus/plane/train, it doesn't weigh up against carrying a brick with you.
My complaint is also, why do they weight so much? Even phones with the same dimensions of an older one keep increasing their weight. This phone is 201 g, which has become the new normal so I can't complain really much but it's still not the phone for me. And it's about 170 mm tall, which it's huge but sadly normal in 2025.
I haven't thought about it as much as I have about sizes, but you do have an interesting point to ponder. I can only offer an explanation, but no consolation:
I guess electronics has gotten denser, and density for the same volume is what quite literally translates to larger weight. The density thing is because they're able to cram more electronics, as our fabrication technology inches forward (i.e. Intel/TSMC/Nvidia/etc trying to break the 1nm barrier for transistors).
Remember the old Nokia phones, where the plastic shell likely amounted to as much volume that a modern phone instead dedicates to the entire front camera device? The latter will weigh much more than the plastic, for the same volume. Now apply that to _every_ component in the modern phone, and the difference is multiplicative -- there's just more features in every cubic millimeter of the phone today. No wonder it's getting heavier.
I had a phone where the top half of the touch screen broke, so I installed "quick cursor" to be able to access it. I still use it on my new phone since it enables me to control everything using only about 1/3 of the touch screen. This should really come built in to the OS, especially since the app requires some pretty aggressive permissions to work.
I completely agree with you, my app functionality should be built inside the OS because of better integration, privacy reasons, etc.
I just wanted to add that because of this permissions my app needs in order to work, I will never add the internet permission to Quick Cursor. I took this decission 5 years ago when I started the app because I understood the privacy risk, and my app will never have internet access permission.
In order for an app to have access to internet, it needs to have the android.permission.INTERNET added to its manifest, otherwise it won't work. This can be checked easily, there are some apps that shows you this info about your installed apps, or by manually looking at the AndroidManifest in the .APK of the app.
I am using GrapheneOS, and I think this OS actually also allows you to explicitly toggle the Network permission off for apps that require it, but I did notice that it wasn't even present on the list to begin with :). I also like to disable Network for things like keyboard apps.
I don't but could you not forget that some people don't have a car.
You can walk or use transit in proper cities.
When I need a bag then it is not a phone it is a laptop without keyboard.
The context is the same though, regardless of screen size? The UI and/or UX doesn't change much when the screen is physically smaller? The resolution usually stays the same, and even if it shrank or grew, most apps wouldn't care as the libraries used to render their widgets are more or less "resolution invariant".
I mean I get what you're implying, I am just making sure I understand the meaning of "context" here. But if you have large fingers, smaller buttons obviously make the device harder to use, no two ways about it. However, in Android and iOS both, it's possible (for the user) to scale everything up, to help solve that very problem.
The bigger battery argument is a valid one too, but you have to keep in mind that most of the battery is consumed by the screen on average, and larger screen will eat more battery, so it's a bit like the rocket equation -- bigger rocket needs more fuel, more fuel needs more space and adds weight to the rocket, more rocket more fuel again and so on. In terms of batteries and rockets both, there's a golden middle there somewhere, I think. But it's a moving quantity since both screens and batteries are different -- OLED vs LED-lit LCD screen and LiPo vs LiOn for battery and so on. In short: I don't think a 5,5" phone (my preferred size) will suffer from shorter battery life, perhaps on the contrary (vs. a 6,5"). Especially considering that _large_ phones tend to be made _thinner_, since their ergonomics depends more on thickness (for the large width and height), perhaps becoming a problem with more than 8mm thickness, while a 5,5" phone can in fact be used comfortably even if it was 8-10mm thick, since it's smaller in the other two dimensions. That extra afforded thickness can directly translate to a battery that is as large or larger in terms of capacity as one for a 7mm "slick" 6,5" phone.
And can you give a number on the "vocal minority"? Because companies usually sell what customers want and if the majority of the phones on the market is big, then that's what people want.
- put best specs in largest devices (fomo-ish, status symbol)
- put highest cost on largest devices (status symbol)
- um? not even create smaller devices would also do it I guess?
The problem isn't that this hypothetical vocal minority is completely imaginary, but that consumers will repeatably gravitate toward the biggest and most glitterliest product. Only few realizes it's not what they want.
The problem isn’t that the majority of phones are big, it’s that virtually all are big and heavy. There is no modern, properly supported smartphone with 4.x” or 5.x” diagonal or below 150 grams anymore.
In all frankness, I think this is the legandary "if people wanted a faster horse..." statement of Henry Ford -- consumers don't always know what they want, and I know quite a few who couldn't confidently answer the question "why did you buy a 6,5" iPhone?" with anything else but "I have used iPhone all my life and this is the size they sell", meaning the consumer doesn't choose much, the choice is to buy a newer iPhone. The simplified argument that goes along "phones are getting larger because consumers want larger phones" is indeed only that -- a very simplified way to look at it. There's much more going on there.
It's very similar to smart TVs. Yes, most people do prefer smart TVs, but vendors use it very successfully to sell inferior displays (poor color, poor contrast etc), to compensate and to pull more selling margin, since that's how the consumer functions (being utterly unable to quantify display quality for an uncalibrated TV). Anyway, I am digressing -- the point of my comparison is that it's complicated and not nearly as simple as "consumers want larger phones / TVs with slow menus and shitty picture as long as there's Netflix in there".
Yes, but no "flagship" devices from mainstream brands, only specialty/novelty stuff. The last <6" flagship I'm aware of was the Asus Zenphone 10 in 2023.
Technically yes: there is iPhone 13 Mini and in Android world there is 2 or 3 Unihertz models and some "no-name" Chinese Aliexpress brands (Cubot has some small model, AFAIR, and there is several even more no-name offers).
Realistically no. All these Android models are underspecced. Old cores (8+ years old), small screen resolutions (small in PPI, not like small as screen proportion to big ones), small amount of RAM and storage (latest Uniherz is happy exception in this area, but not in the others), very bad cameras, very short OS update period (if ever).
iPhone 13 mini is Ok-ish (my wife uses one): camera is still very poor, but all other is usable.
Android is worse. If all you need are phone calls, and messaging with Telegram/Whatsapp/Signal it is Ok. But if you need good camera, good browsing experience (many open tabs) or something specific you are out of luck. Even Google Maps could be sluggish. Plus zero-days in old Android versions.
Good cameras is my pet peeve: good ones go only to flagship models and maybe sub-flagship ones (like, flagship and sub-flagship can be differentiated by addition of tele-module, which is most useful for me).
I have a question to you (I've tried to google this up to no luck): which is last official update for Android for Jelly Star? It was released with Android 13, did it get 14? 15? 16?
OS updates looks like pain point for all these non-mainstream phones to me, am I right or it is wrong impression?
I think your argument is flawed -- perhaps rephrasing it to say is that _Apple_ tried bringing back a smaller _iPhone_ and _presumably_ few _existing_ customers bought them, would have made a better one? Because I would assume most of iPhone buyers are either _existing_ iPhone users, or people who swear to Apple software (iOS, MacOS) so this is about being able to read the statistics correctly.
Add to the above that iPhone "mini" might have been slower or just "worse" and it wasn't just the screen that was reduced in size, so the word of mouth might have been that the phone is simply worse, and that contributed to poor sales.
There's no way of telling how a 5,5" phone would fare until there's consistent prolonged feature-parity based sales of such phones that are otherwise identical to other offerings by the same brand, across multiple brands (if I am a die-hard Fairphone customer, I am not buying an iPhone regardless of screen size) to help gather proper statistics.
As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.
The lowest alternative, 13 Pro Max had double the sale volume (at 1.5x the cost), while the VAST majority chose the 6.1" models instead, how does that support the argument the desire for a >5.5" phone is from a vocal minority? The articles themselves directly state the sales of small models are poor, it's not the other way around no matter how you spin the charts.
The markets for smaller phones and the larger Pro Max models look like they’re roughly in the same order of magnitude. It doesn’t look like a negligible demand that is not worth serving.
You chose to interpret that me pointing out the hardware is 8 years old meant I expected cutting edge technology, as if there wasn't 8 years oh hardware innovations in-between the hardware used and "cutting-edge technology". (The A720 and A510 are 4 years old, not exactly cutting-edge but would be a dramatic improvement)
There was nothing to extrapolate. I made a remark on the hardware, and you chose to view the world as black and white ("if he mentions the old age of the hardware he must necessarily expect the brand new cutting edge hardware and must not realize that small indie FOSS projects don't have the same resources as Apple").
Because both comments you quoted did not put words in my mouth like you did. They can laugh in iPhone all they want, they didn't say I expected iPhone performance out of this Linux phone. Same for the other comment, they're expressing their opinions, not projecting it on me.
You're the one being disingenuous, and I'm done exchanging with you.
You don't think it's obnoxious to aggressively put words in people's mouths and becoming even more aggressive and accusatory when getting some gentle "that's not what I said" pushback on that? Practically no one has an interaction like that and walks away with a positive experience. You can say "your comment would have been better without that remark, don't respond to a bad comment by making a bad comment". Okay, fine. I wouldn't even have responded. But it's really not the "obnoxious to the highest degree"-remark that's the core problem here, it's the "obnoxious to the highest degree"-behaviour. This is exactly how good (non-obnoxious) people stop coming back.
Even if all that is true, "you're being obnoxious to the highest degree" counts as name-calling in the sense that we use that term here and it's not a borderline call. You can make your substantive points without that kind of thing, so please do, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse, so if we rely on those perceptions. we're guaranteed to end up in a downward spiral.
Well, the CPU is OK for mobile, but the GPU/GPU-driver situation is not. Just look at the Pinephone to see a device with fine CPU performance that struggles with UI. Though, in fairness, some of this could be fixed with more optimized software.
Also still waiting for more userspace tools to support the v4l2-requests API for hardware video decoding.
And don't forget _overdimensioning_. Vendors love this because volume scales cubically with increase in any one of width, height and depth -- they're not the ones carrying the phone, but they can pack more features into one, quite literally. FOSS vendors more so since they need more ground to compete on (hardware being older and price being high enough because of economy of scale).
FOSS mobile hardware vendors already have a hard enough niche to target, "people who say they want small phones" is just fuel to the already burning fire for them. Each niche they add does not add the user base together, it multiplies the userbase percentages.
Its not the OSS nature. Any product from scratch will be expensive to start with and reduce in price eventually. There is a reason why Tesla didn't start with Model Y first.
Underspeccing is specific to mobile industry. But I agree with you here. Going for premium specs is a better way to start. But they'll have to pick a specs that works for them the company and can reach maximum people. So I also acknowledge that it's tough.
Omfg ! The phone I didn't know I wanted. I've grown so sick of Google's BS with android and their policies.
I want a phone that I own and I can hack a little bit.
This is going to be my next phone !
I'm very curious about the Android app support and if by any magic it can do payment. But even if it doesn't it's still going to be an improvement over my pixel
Does this support connection to a docking station so it can be used like a desktop?
If so, I'm very interested.
Edited to add: some reviews say it supports mouse and keyboard via dock, The Register says it didn't support an external USB-C display (that was from March this year, so the earlier version), but then another review said that used it as an Ethernet router, so Ethernet via dock must work.
I tested with 2 different USB-C docks and a USB-C to HDMI monitor cable. They're the only ones I have.
One is from a Gemini PDA and has USB-A, USB-C and Ethernet. I think I did not test Ethernet but I can do that. The dock contains an Ethernet controller: it's a USB-attached Ethernet card, effectively. It works on Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, etc.
As far as I recall the FLX1 detected the Ethernet port but I didn't test it.
The other dock has audio, various sizes of USB, and HDMI out. All the ports worked except display. You can drive the phone with a full sized keyboard and mouse, which is amusing but useless. You can power the phone from the dock while in use.
But it can't drive a display, which is a damned shame and a deal-breaker for the form-factor. Otherwise this could be a real PC in your pocket.
The company told me it was working on wireless display support but I do not own any wireless displays to test with.
Thank you for clarifying, and thanks for your contributions to The Register!
It's most definitely a shame that it doesn't support an external display via the dock (which kinda makes moot the fact it supports other peripherals), I've used two different docks (both requiring DisplayLink drivers) with my home Linux setup and every kernel update is a crapshoot as to whether the dock-connected displays will blink back into life post reboot, or stubbornly stay blank until I roll back to the previous kernel version and await the drivers to catch up.
As such, I kinda understand that it may be harder than expected to get working for a device like this.
Having recently setup a new GrapheneOS device, however, it means I'm less motived to change mobile platforms again. Desktop-via-dock support could have convinced me.
It does mot support display output via USB C, and I'm guessing Ethernet will also be very limited because the usb is 2.0, which is very sad to see on a Linux phone.
I wish someone with with money would just make a deal with a niche Chinese company like blackview or oukitel to allow making a Linux for their hardware. Not trying to make the same stuff as everyone does as it will be niche for quite a while.
If all you want is a smartphone that runs Linux- this will do the job. But it's hardly serviceable when banking apps won't run on it.. and you're sure to get sub-par performance on anything else on top of the slow chip.
At the moment GrapheneOS is better for more people. It's secure, reliable and polished. But in the long run the continued development of Linux phones and getting away from the current duopoly is definitely a good thing.
I'm using GrapheneOS now, and will switch to a Linux phone when the basics are nailed down and the price is reasonable.
With a de-Googled Android device you get lots more apps, but it's still Android.
This is Debian atop an Android kernel, with Android in a container. The native OS is a desktop Linux. You can upgrade your OS with `apt update ; apt-get full-upgrade -y`.
If you want a pocket Linux phone, I think it's about the best.
As much as I'm interested in running Linux on my next mobile device, I'm not inclined to trust a single company to provide both the device and the OS. I have no reason to distrust Furi Labs, but trust is earned, not granted.
First of all, why is there so little documentation about "FuriOS"? What exactly has Furi Labs changed from the base Debian system to warrant a rebadging? Why can't I know which software it's using? Why are there so few screenshots and videos of the device (besides from the "volunteered" reviews)?
I understand that selling hardware is how they recoup their development costs, and focusing on a single device allows them to deliver a better user experience. But I would still like to try their OS on a device I may already have, before I decide to shell out $550 for, frankly, pretty lackluster hardware.
Interesting since Apple and Goog both ship their OS on their hardware.
It's Debian with Phosh and Halium (Android drivers) installed to an older ubiquitous Android handset. Not perfect but a compelling shortcut. Distros have been created with less differentiation.
First Linux phone in a while that is not a decade behind hardware wise. This one is only perhaps half that, haha. My iPhone 6s is still snappy however, so it should be fine.
We desperately need Linux phones to succeed, especially in the current geopolitical situation. Not everybody lives in a country aligned with either the US (Apple/Google) or China (Xiaomi etc.).
You're partially correct. Ubuntu Touch was discontinued by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) in April 2017.
However, Ubuntu Touch was picked up by the UBports project (that by now has their own foundation) and has been continued to this day. Currently they are preparing a Ubuntu Touch release based on Ubuntu 24.04 (moving on from Ubuntu 20.04). See https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/ for more.
Regarding the FLX1(s): FuriLabs worked on a way to support Ubuntu Touch apps (that can be found at https://open-store.io/) natively on FuriOS. It's also possible to boot Ubuntu Touch on their FLX1 hardware.
It says "The FLX1s from Furi Labs runs a fully optimized Linux system called FuriOS", never heard of FuriOS but seems they're not using Ubuntu Touch, at the very most it's a fork of it.
how does that happen btw? like it's understandable when a website is hosted on a vape (lol), but even a cheap vps should be able to handle like 10-20k views in the span of a couple hours (which is the max load from HN i'm assuming), unless you're hosting video or some such
It depends! You can make a website with a static text file or you can make a video run as the background. There are more ways to mess it up than to get it right, actually.
I'm doing a bit of WordPress work lately, and the whole server freezes while it responds to a single HTTP request for several seconds. If you open a bunch of links in new tabs, you can watch them load one by one, for the next 20-30 seconds.
I use a blog that does three 'direct' (do you mean synchronous?) database queries for every pageview. Language was PHP5 (I feel like 7 got a lot faster but didn't do benchmarks so idk). Standard WAMP stack, renders in about 35 milliseconds on 2001 (sic) hardware iirc, and the HN homepage is very comfortably under 10 requests per second, so it's idling most of the time.
Database queries and interpreted languages aren't an issue at all. You need to be majorly unprepared to not be able to handle HN load. What I think people might overlook is that there will be other news outlets and social media that link to their website also. So it's hard to pass a verdict, though someone mentioned it's WordPress in a sibling comment so... I'd put my money on that it's poorly optimised but we can't really know I guess
> The FLX1s from Furi Labs runs a fully optimized Linux system called FuriOS, packing a lightning fast user interface, 3 hardware switches for microphone, camera and modem/gps, and a privacy centric approach like no other.
Another expensive phone... sorry but the price is 3x of my phone which has 6Gb RAM (compared to 8 Gb here) and the same number of cores, maybe less performant but who cares, I am not planning to do machine learning on a phone anyway. Also mine has better screen resolution despite lower price.
Yes the firmware is non-free, but I have kernel sources so I can either try to port a open-source OS on it, or simply reverse-engineer and patch the existing firmware.
Also I am not sure if Linux desktop environment (Wayland, Pipewire and friends) is a good choice. Why not use AOSP, which is free, has everything, is optimized, has lot of f-droid apps and is tested on millions of devices? It has modern languages like Kotlin, and GUI frameworks like Flutter. And are there mobile apps for standard Linux desktop?
> Whether used for coding, ... designing, or multitasking with everyday apps, our device delivers the performance
Sorry, I don't think small screen with tiny keyboard is any good for coding or design. Smartphone is only good for taking/watching photos, reading or chatting.
There is a difference between a programming language support and having complete GUI framework, set of libraries and applications. Also what would you use to write GUI for Linux? Non-reactive libraries are not an option due to being outdated and inefficient programming style.
It is one thing if AOSP has some fundamental issues that cannot be patched/fixed, and another thing if someone just doesn't like it.
The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
They’re selling it for the same price as the outgoing model despite tons of bullshit tariffs being levied against them. What an achievement!
I want a Linux phone that works, and I want to support a world where Linux phones exist and are financially viable to make, therefore I will buy this as my next phone.
My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.
I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.
postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.
If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.
And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.
I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.
It uses halium and libhybris. Flatpak apps work perfectly fine on my FLX1. I have no usability issues with the phone at all.
you don't really need flatpak
I don't really need a cell phone, either.
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,
That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.
Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)
Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)
Github repo contributors are not hidden.
eg: https://github.com/FuriLabs/rootfs-templates/graphs/contribu...
Thanks, my bad.
It is not nor should it be a showstopper. A functioning device that can be widely used helps build eg an app ecosystem. That part needs to exist and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hallium or not.
This isn’t an all or nothing situation.
I guess I might agree, so long as that ecosystem is shared with Purism Librem 5 (a potentially sustainable device, if not affordable), and so long as a more affordable but also sustainable device (which means non-Hallium) will actually appear in response to this ecosystem stimulus.
At all times during the ecosystem stimulus, someone has to be keeping an eye on the real goal. Which is getting those affordable, trustworthy, sustainable hardware devices to become available.
(I've seen Linux handheld/phone projects fail for ~25 years, wasted lots of time and money on them, and would be happy to see something solve the hard problem of open drivers.)
> Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?)
Go lurk in their Matrix chat. They've noted in there that they didn't exactly have a ton of choice in stuff like this because you don't really get a ton of options as a small operation.
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
My Librem 5's camera is fully functioning just fine. Many entries in that table are either outdated or pmOS-specific, or marked as "partial" because they require some tiny manual intervention that's not a big deal in practice.
The pictures I shoot on my Librem 5 look nothing like the (pretty good) ones that you regularly post to the Fediverse. My photos are just a faded, grey, blurred, grainy mess. I can take the time and manually set focus (autofocus never works) but the manual focus slider and button are so difficult to read that by the time I figure out whether or not the slider is enabled, the photo opportunity is long gone.
When I look at your photos, I often wonder what I might be doing differently than you. But after two years of daily driving my Librem 5, I decided to no longer care, and just stopped making photos altogether.
I am taking photos with regular Millipixels from PureOS Byzantium like everyone else, without setting anything manually aside of triggering the autofocus sequence when necessary (in the latest version it can be triggered by simply tapping the preview; previously you had to cycle the "auto" button). The only thing that I do differently is how I turn the raw DNG file into a JPEG: see https://gitlab.com/dos1/glowup and https://source.puri.sm/-/snippets/1223
I think that's because Sebastian develops software for the Librem 5 and thus is likely not running a stock PureOS Byzantium.
I managed to get similar results in my holidays in late August(on postmarketOS 25.06 with Millipixels 0.23.0 and a patched kernel [1]).
Please note that I just used the Librem 5 as my "mainline Linux camera" and have not had a SIM in it in a while, and thus can't comment on how well postmarketOS 25.06 would work for daily driving.
[1]: Based on the APKBUILD in postmarketOS (https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob...) with https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/merge_requests/816.pa... added on top.
The only major thing these kernel changes introduce is RAW10 support, which helps photos with high dynamic range that would have visible banding in the shadows otherwise. There are more changes, but their effects are either subtle or unrelated to still photos. Most of the pictures I post have been taken without these changes, only some of the most recent ones used them.
>(in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else)
Nit: The Pine64 PinePhone's cameras at least have been fully functional since 2021. It's a very shitty pair of cameras, but they're definitely fully functional.
I know the wiki.postmarketos.org page for it says the camera support is "Partial" and that a bunch of drivers are out-of-tree. This and much of the rest of the page is extremely outdated, and I (maintainer) just haven't had the time to go through that page and fix it up.
I'm not a PostmarketOS user (I prefer Mobian), but thanks for maintaining the PmOS Pinephone port. It's thanks to people like you that real Linux distros on phones can continue to work and get better.
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all
From what I have been able to tell, the folks behind Furilabs are also behind Droidian, which is Halium/libhybrys based. Furilabs/FuriOS is the commercial version of it.
seems correct.
https://github.com/FuriLabs/rootfs-templates/blob/forky/furi...
> postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers
this is why halium exists. OEMs don't produce drivers beyond whatever kernel they ship with, so this is an attempt to build a system that leverages the crap they do ship.
> why stop at the OS?
Because the OS is the only thing you control. The reason the Librem 5 costs so much for a decade-old platform is because they didn't grab a predesigned device from another OEM. Doing everything yourself is going to be the only way to produce a first-class linux phone.
> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else
I wish usb cameras were sold in the same form-factor as phone thermal cameras. Then the missing drivers for the built-in cameras wouldn't matter as much.
I doubt the market is nig enough, but I know at least a few people who I'm sure would buy a phone that was actually as thin as the new iPhone Mini pretends to be without the camera bump, then have a USB C camera attachment for the rare occasion they need to take a photo.
Not many people want to have to have an extra camera plugged into their phone because the built in ones don't work. HN sometimes...
No: this would allow such cameras to be internally connected to a custom-built phone via USB, but without the connector, oor using a tiny connector. Think Framework laptop peripherals, only built-in
"I wish usb cameras were sold in the same form-factor as phone thermal cameras."
Once you have the camera-controlling binary blob separated in an MCU behind a USB interface, you can run a modern kernel (maybe not even Linux), without running the binary blob in it.
I think the crucial issue here is Android app compatibility. Desktop Linux programs aren't suited for use on mobile devices; the experience is inevitably poor. Android compatibility is claimed, but no information beyond that is provided. If this device does not run at the very least any app that does not depend on Google Play, e.g. apps from F-Droid, it's dead on arrival. In that case, you are much better off with a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Graphene is very polished and has 100% compatibility with Android. Everything just works and the user experience is as good as an official Android device, only free of Google spyware.
> If this device does not run at the very least any app that does not depend on Google Play, e.g. apps from F-Droid
It does.
I have an FLX1, a review sample.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
I had 3 app stores on mine: Amazon, F-Droid, and Aurora. Apps from all 3 worked.
"I think the crucial issue here is Android app compatibility ..."
I thought there was a robust android emulator for linux such that I could run android apps - and call an Uber or whatever - from desktop linux ...
Is that not so ?
>I thought there was a robust android emulator for linux such that I could run android apps - and call an Uber or whatever - from desktop linux ...
There are some but not really great and it will become impossible very soon with remote attestation and play integrity. Already Uber is one of the few apps that have the hardware attestation keys for grapheneos manually added.
In my experience, Waydroid works very well actually. The question is whether it wouldn't just be simpler and better to use AOSP (or Graphene) as the OS for these phones. In principle, a "Linux phone" sounds great, until you realize that there are close to zero Linux programs that are actually usable on a small touch display. The Android project already has done the hard work of adapting Linux to mobile devices and FOSS apps are plentiful and polished. The problem with the common variety of Android phones is control by Google, not the underlying tech.
> close to zero Linux programs that are actually usable on a small touch display
Beg to differ: https://linuxphoneapps.org/
(And no, that does not list all of them. Only all I got around to adding.)
Fair enough, but how many of these are as polished as their Android counterparts? How many are still actively maintained and will be for the foreseeable future? Android already is "Linux for mobile devices" and has all the features people expect from a phone. Reinventing the wheel on the software side seems counterproductive when what we need is simply more hardware to run Android on. I wish Furi collaborated with Graphene or Lineage and released a proper FLOSS Android device instead of going the "desktop Linux" route.
AFAIK GrapheneOS is in the talks with a hardware company and we may end up with a GrapheneOS-first device!
Wait, many people are complaining that PC applications and websites are designed with a touch screen / mobile in mind... Think about the UI, huge spacing, etc. So which is it?
Yeah everything works except payment, and banking apps, and probably some other stuff. Considering Google's policy direction this isn't going to improve sadly
To be precise, there's an Android API called Play Integrity that defines a device's integrity. This integrity can be STRONG, DEVICE, BASIC, and no integrity.
GrapheneOS can only pass a check for BASIC integrity. It cannot pass a check for DEVICE or STRONG integrity.
STRONG integrity is hardware-backed (think TPM) and is not spoofable. DEVICE integrity can be spoofed and there are tools to do it, if you root your device, but Graphene does not want to this for various reasons. [1]
It is up to the developer of every app to choose to use this API or not, and to lock some or all of the features of their app behind this API.
GrapheneOS actually supports hardware integrity (the STRONG variant), but in a particular way. Every OS integrity API (including eg. Secure Boot) is based on a list of master keys, that are installed with every computer. Users that want to install custom operating system that are not signed by a major company will have to enroll their own keys into the Secure Boot system.
Hardware integrity also requires root keys, and those are owned by Google. But the API is actually general enough to allow both a "Verified" (signed by a root Google key) and "SelfSigned" custom keys. GrapheneOS provides a guide [2] that describes how to adapt the hardware integrity checks to accept either a Verified key or a SelfSigned key from a list of keys from GrapheneOS.
There is no reason why app developers should not accept operating systems signed by GrapheneOS just like those signed by Google, for the simple reason that it provides the exact same anti-tamper protection.
Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.
[1]: "they use fingerprinting techniques such as GPU fingerprinting and send along that data, which enables detecting and banning spoofing. It is NOT practical to pretend to pass these checks. It is only possible in the short term at a small scale. It will get banned and stop working."
[2]: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
>Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.
This is the stated reason, but the behavior of it is anything but: if they really cared, they would fail massively outdated versions of android that have critical remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, but they do not. It is also much easier to tamper with a ROM slightly and have a version that passes these checks, compared to having a secure, up-to-date, maintainable ROM that passes.
You can't use Google Pay obviously if the phone is de-Googled. That's a good thing IMO, the last thing I want is Google tracking how I spend my money. Carrying a credit card in a wallet case with my phone is a very minor inconvenience.
The Bank of America app runs on Graphene without issues however. So generally speaking it is not true that banking apps don't run on de-Googled phones. Here it is the developers that are to blame if they enforce compliance with Google's requirements and don't stick to the basic FOSS version of the OS.
My banking app works without any issues, but I do have google play enabled.
And let's be honest, it's not like there hasn't been spent a decade or more, with thousands of developers working tirelessly on making Android as good as it is today. Like linux laptops not burning up immediately is itself a change upstreamed from android development, but that's just half of the story.
A mobile OS fundamentally needs a different application model -- apps can't just decide to run whenever they like. How will desktop GIMP know that it shouldn't waste my battery when in the background (unless it very specially requests it throuhg an API made just for that)? Does suspending it work as you expect? For how long will you suspend it, shouldn't you kill it as well after a while? Who saves stuff?
I can't help but feel that anyone strongly advocating for a GNU Linux phone (because let's be honest, Android is the linux phone) is just not familiar with the actual context of what it entails.
No one is running gimp on their phone, besides for laughs. There are a number mobile-centric apps in the repos, stick to them and you'll be fine.
The issue is that the mobile-centric apps are few and far fetween, and not nearly as polished as the Android ecosystem.
I maintain a project [1] that tries to collect and track them all, and ... at least for keeping track of how they all develop, there's not a few apps. ;-)
[1]: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
You currently list 720 apps, Google Play Store has 3.3 million.
Even if we assume that a good chunk of that may be "duplicate" in terms of functionality (e.g. todo apps), that is still just a completely different dimension of apps and use cases covered by android natively.
I don't recommend using the vast majority of mobile apps, which exist for data-mining and addiction-maintenance purposes. Android is specifically known as the worst ecosystem in this regard. Browsers continue to work, despite the corporate push to dark patterns.
It's Linux, if you need something you or someone else will eventually write it. But first there needs to be acceptable, working hardware. Enter the FLX1/s, and we come full circle.
Sure, the majority of mobile apps suck. But even then, 1% of it is still orders of magnitude larger than the number of "Linux" apps, and there are surely more actually decent mobile apps than that.
Besides, open-source doesn't have to be GNU, there are a bunch of open source apps on F-Droid.
(See cousin comment.)
I don't need more than a handful of apps, one being a browser. These already exist.
I also reject non-free apps whose main purpose is to snoop on their users like Facebook. But what about dozens of FOSS projects like Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Nextcloud, KeePass and many others? All of these have polished clients that work perfectly on Android and provide an experience that rivals or surpasses commercial offerings. They took years to develop and I don't expect Linux phone versions will ever be released because of the chicken and egg problem. You can emulate these apps with Waydroid on a Linux device, but you will almost certainly lose some features like GPS access or notifications. At the end of the day, you will mainly be running Android apps anyway, free or non-free, so you are better off with an Android device in the first place.
I currently use 0 Android apps, so honestly believe one could survive without them.
I'm glad Waydroid is a thing for folks that are, and sorry attestation prevents full compatibility. But neither issue should get in the way of investment in modern Linux phones, which I've been desperately waiting for, for years.
Web apps are still a thing as well, believe it or not.
It doesn't run Debian, it runs (a fork of) Droidian which relies on Android layer underneath. There are other Linux phones that do actually run Debian and don't rely on Android.
You are referring to postmaketOS for which the project leaders themselves claim there is no flagship device where everything works as expected?
No.
I don't know what they are referring to, I can't speak for them, but...
• postmarketOS is unrelated to Debian.
• postmarketOS is based on Alpine.
• FuriLabs does not use Alpine or postmarketOS.
• FuriOS is Droidian is a Debian derivative.
• FuriOS is Debian running on an Android kernel, with Android in a container you can stop and start on demand.
Nothing you claimed applies here.
I think seba_dos1 refers to PureOS [0] (for the Librem 5; PureOS is essentially a FSF-endorsed Debian) and Mobian [1]. Both use a close-to-mainline kernel, Mobian's goal is to "bring Debian to mobile devices. Over time, the idea is to minimize the Mobian specific pieces by “upstreaming” customization to the original projects."
[0]: https://pureos.net/
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/
True. This seems like an amazing device especially given the total B.S Google and Apple have been throwing at us. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it were available in my country.
It never was, it's VC news
Hear hear. I’m excited about this and may get one just to support the cause even though my iPhone 13 mini is still just fine.
> Linux phone that actually works
Then why do all photos of this phone show the logo, not the actual OS it’s running? If it’s running something that is not Android, I would expect a page how the OS actually looks and works before considering it a serious, working alternative to Android.
I think just like "Made in the US," a lot of people say they want one, but most really don't, due to either price, hardware, and/or software drawbacks.
Many want one, fewer agree to afford.
>I want a Linux phone that works
That's Jolla C2 or some Sailfish-compatible Xperia 10.
Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.
> Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.
That's a hell of a hot take. Could you elaborate on why you think so?
Phone UI paradigm isn't as easy as "Let's just scale down the Desktop/Tablet applications". In case of Sailfish OS development history, migration from clunky, but closer to Desktop, Hildon framework of Maemo 5 to purpose-built Qt applications of Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan was obvious quality boost. Same with webOS and UBports: app ecosystem starting from scratch within their corresponding "DE"s. If convergence-style cross-device applications were somewhat easily achievable, that would've happened in the early 2010s (Windows Phone / Windows RT? Ubuntu Touch getting more attention from investors?). It's the same story why Android Tablets suck and iPadOS doesn't, but in other direction.
And/or, it's a simple matter of time/money being spent on streamlining the experience. It's not like Sailfish OS is perfect (Qt6 migration is way overdue), but Jolla has already figured out lots of integration details which will become teething problems for Droidian and such. Including, but not limited to VoLTE support.
I'm not convinced that convergent UI works either. The needs of desktop and mobile just differ too greatly.
That doesn't mean that the two can't be served by the same UI framework, but at minimum you need two sets of widgets and separate desktop/mobile layouts in order to not either make the desktop experience dumbed down or end up with a mobile experience that's awkward to use with touch.
The padding and control size in GNOME feels completely goofy on a desktop machine for example and reduces the usability of 12"-13" laptops with how much space is eaten up by blank space.
> I'm not convinced that convergent UI works either. The needs of desktop and mobile just differ too greatly.
For the record, I agree. But I've been playing with Apple's new Liquid Glass UI on macOS / iOS and I think they've done a pretty good job of defining platform-agnostic UI primitives and layouts with some platform-specific rules when needed.
It's a big redesign that covers desktop / mobile / tablet / TV. They did a pretty clever job of it, though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
I've been seeing this myself since I use several Apple products, and while parts are done well…
> though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
This is the part that makes it not work. The Liquid Glass transition isn't the only thing that's negatively impacted desktop UI in macOS, but also the several revisions of iOS-7-like flat designs since 10.10 Yosemite with a slow but constant march of papercuts. So even in the prior version (Sequoia), a great deal of damage had already been done. Tahoe's Liquid Glass compares less favorably against the much more "desktoppy" 10.9 Mavericks.
Trust me, I'm with you 100%. I weep for the Mac OS X we used to have.
I'm just trying to look at it from Apple's eyes. From their perspective, I think, they're trying to design a UI framework that exists beyond any particular device form factor. UI design in the abstract, where specific platforms are particular manifestations of their Platonic UI ideal.
So you have something of a broad convergence of macOS / iOS / iPadOS / visionOS / etc. design elements, like rounded application windows, UI widgets (button/toolbar/...), ecosystem stuff (app widgets, live activities), and Apple technologies (Control Center, Spotlight, Siri, notifications).
Layout is (mostly) grouped relative to display size, not interaction method (like touch v. mouse). Similar display sizes have similar application layouts. Large = (macOS, visionOS, tvOS, iPadOS), medium = (iOS, iPadOS [small devices], CarPlay), small = (Apple Watch). Large display layouts tend to have the menu bar, toolbars, and side bars.
I could go on but it's getting late. This might be a half-baked idea, but I'm pretty sure this is more-or-less how Apple is approaching their platforms now with the Liquid Glass redesign.
> Phone UI paradigm isn't as easy as "Let's just scale down the Desktop/Tablet applications".
Have you tried modern Gnome/GTK+ 4 applications? You can resize the window to a tiny size and it seamlessly "scales down" to a phone layout. Very handy even on a desktop. Yes, there are real differences besides size (phone UI needs a lot of inactive padding around tap areas because finger taps are imprecise; it greatly prefers swipes to taps, while a pointer-based UI prefers clicks to drag'n'drop; phone UI needs long taps as a secondary action, etc.) but they're minor in the grand scheme of things.
You mean modern in the sense that is no designer any longer, one has to code everything manually, and the designer that was going to be done, was based on Web technologies?
I somehow agree with this statement too. Although I don't dislike current GNOME, I think Mer Linux (SailfishOS and Nemo) as well as its predecesors (MeeGo and Maemo) are much more pleasant to use on a small screen. The others don't look very optimized for that usecase. Actually, MeeGo, as shipped in a Nokia N9, was in many aspects the most elegant mobile UI I've ever seen.
I saw dang's comment of praise here for your post, which is meant to highlight "hackers" bringing something new to the market. Got it, but your post's comments of praise is vacuous if you don't own one and speak from first-hand knowledge. How can you praise it as a phone "that actually works" if you don't own one?
> The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
It’s funny because excessive negativity is peak HN (see: Dropbox post) but yeah, it’s amazing how many people are focused on how this couldn’t/doesn’t work than got it could/does.
I bought 4 Firefox phones, am itching for hardware that I truly own in the age of AI, and I’m ready to be hurt again.
Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Edit: If you notice that this does not match with another comment I've made saying I wouldn't buy this because of the size, I can only offer as a defence that I'm also trying to vote with my wallet about the size of phones so I'm torn.
I think it's probably better on balance to have a small phone that does everything that it should perfectly, and live with the compromise of living with the walled garden, while still being small to easily hold and encourage me to go and use a more appropriate device than something I've pulled from my pocket for any task that requires staring at a screen.
> Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.
Good news, it’s not too late, I still have 2 FX0s and 2 others (jk but if you’re in Tokyo maybe not jk)
Also not sure I was doing God’s work, the second app (PWA) I made for FirefoxOS was a Tinder clone using their undocumented API
And definitely no problem with people not buying, not everyone is a first adopter and that’s fine (I’m not either).
That said a slightly too large phone is probably not a high price to pay for appreciably more freedom, just my 2c
The phone for Furries? Count my furry friends in!
Har har - from their FAQ[1]: Furi is pronounced “Fury”. FuriOS is pronounced “Furious”. We simply couldn’t afford the Fury part of the domain names.
1: https://furilabs.com/faq/
> This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.
"Shut up and take my mo... 170mm x 76 mm, 201g? Sigh - never mind!"
Sorry for adding one more awful comment. If they make a mini version, I will absolutely put my money where my mouth is.
> Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world,
That is a vanishingly low bar, apparently. We don't need to praise something just because it is FOSS. With it's quite old hardware and limited software it instantly becomes unattractive for many.
That was always the challenge for computer phones, to get the phone part of the phone work. There's been many Wi-Fi only PDAs, non-calling data cards for those, non-calling but cellular-enabled ones, etc. before iOS/Android happened.
I'm glad for this release but I think users are cynical because of the state of things since the Pinephone and Purism releases. There had been what felt like very little progress towards a "daily driver" device. Mind you I think Sailfish has shown it's doable a long time, but this is cast aside for being paid.
> The comments here are awful. What happened to “Hacker” news?
The contrarian dynamic strikes again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Your comment is a good example of a corrective post, and the upvotes are deserved, but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality. On the internet, everybody needs something to object to!
> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.
Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.
Sometimes it seems like half the comment sections (but probably more like 20% lol) have a "what is wrong with all of you" as the top-rated comment, and I have to scroll way down, 5 or 10 top-level comments, before I find an example that it was referring to. It seems to get more votes by dramatizing the "going against the mainstream", when really it is the mainstream. (Which is kinda sad, but not really the worst thing in world, probably a perennial part of human society ...)
Check out my not-so-mainstream comments! They are usually down-voted to oblivion, not up-voted. :P
Why do none of the modern phones have a flat back? It's crazy to me that seemingly everyone is jumping on the train to have the camera stick out from the back. I guess the camera lens needs more space, but why not then add some additional material so it's still even? I feel like I'm missing something obvious, do people not put down their phone on flat surfaces or something?
This! Just add those 1-2mm and stuff bigger battery in there… (and make it more rugged so most likely no need for additional cover that is even more bulky)
More than rugged, add some knurling so it doesn't slip out of your hands so easily.
my bad, I meant to say "rigid" not "rugged".
probably unpopular opinion but Nokia Lumia had awesome design - they use polycarbons so they case wasn't unpleaseant to touch and had this "rubbery" feelings and was not slippery...
The Sony 10 vii that launched yesterday for 450€ has a grippy back according to reviewers, and the Fairphone 6 I've found has plastic as well (battery is removable so the back needs to come off reasonably, not like these horrible two-micron glass panes)
The problem with most of these soft-touch plastics is they are incompletely polymerized and will eventually disintegrate into a sticky mess you need to strip off to get to the hard plastic they are painted on. Silicone doesn't, but it's seldom used as a coating.
Is that really a problem, given the lifespan of a smartphone? I've only really noticed that to happen to decades-old objects.
While your comment makes sense if you were commenting on an Apple or Samsung phone, but this is a Linux phone. We should be glad there are Linux phones being made available at all and the smallest problem is if there is a camera bump or not.
I hope one day comes when the biggest issue with a Linux phone is a camera bump or some other mechanical detail.
The Pixel 9a is nearly flat (no camera bump). It's great for running GrapheneOS on.
For now. I'll never buy google hardware again after they pulled the rug on publishing drivers for my current pixel.
Most people put replaceable cases on that extend past the camera bump, so making it flat isn't necessary for those people.
Doesn't that just reinforce that they might as well have made a better device?
I'm not a case user but even I agree
No, because they'll likely still want a disposable case protecting their phone.
cases are more replaceable, and they show personality
Or make it in a wedge shape? This may sound crazy, but in 2012, I had a Samsung phone (maybe a Galaxy Nexus -- can't remember exacly). It had different thicknesses at the bottom and the top, and a smooth curvature in between that was pleasing to the hand. The display too, was ever so slightly curved, not enough to fit the contours of a human cheek as you held it up, but just enough to not feel like you're pressing a glass slab to your face.
I actually find a bump better for putting your phone down on a flat surface, and my logic is this:
If your camera lens is flat to the body of the phone, it's more prone to being scratched on a table. With a bump, the lens becomes slightly elevated as the phone balances between the bottom of the case and the edge of the bottom of the camera bump, giving the lens(es) a tiny clearance
I generally agree with your sentiment, but of all the phones I've seen with unwieldy overbites hanging out the back, this is one where the protrusion is small enough that I could live with.
If Apple with their trillions of dollars decided that their new phone should be a thinner one, it tells us that the general public for some reason likes it.
Pixel phones have a bump that stretches from left to right, so it leans on a flat surface slightly tilted up, but still stable. Unlike phone that have the bump on a corner only and will move if you tap it.
People prefer thin to flat. It spends more time in a pocket than on a table. People don’t really put their phones down.
But is it really thin if there are parts that are thicker? The "depth" or whatever should be measured where it's thicker, not thinnest.
I guess I'm too much of an office worker to get that most people have their phones in their pocket, as soon as I sit down at my desk the phone gets placed on the desk.
I will always have a case that has a cut-out for the camera so it still lays flat and it's otherwise thinner (or the case is thicker and thus more protective) than it would be if the camera didn't stick out slightly
Yes because it’s thinner on the part I hold.
People keep asking for this year over year over year ad nauseam. Folks, give it up. It's completely irrelevant.
It made sense when the sensor sizes were a pittance of what they are now 25 years ago. It doesn't make sense in 2025.
Should we still have 480p cameras?
Give me an 8000mah battery. That should take up some more space.
Now your phone is a lot heavier, thicker where it's being held by hands, and the battery lasts longer than anyone needs since we all sleep next to a power outlet at night.
It's funny to me how this thread is a demonstrator of this phenomenon where a tiny minority of enthusiasts think that companies selling tens of millions of units don't know what they're doing. You think Apple and Samsung haven't tried giving focus groups thick and even phones?
The camera bump is at worst a marketing feature for the feature that customers value most.
I would also like to point out that back in the Nokia PureView 808/Lumia 1020 days, enthusiasts thought that big camera bumps were a cool thing. The fact that your Nokia had a real camera with a real xenon flash bulb made it better than the competition.
Hmm... great to see another linux phone but... why on earth they are so vague about the OS? Not to mention no screenshots of the UI...
Also - not so sold on the privacy switches…
Hopefully it's the base Debian with a thin vendor package set (kernel, u-boot, DTBs, firmware, out-of-tree DKMS, and a Halium-based bridge to HALs) tied together by a meta-package. With apt pinning, upgrades would become normal Debian transactions, security updates would track Debian, and the vendor layer stays limited to an LTS kernel delta, boot bits, and a small Halium shim.
Droidian is effectively what you describe. It's the closest feasible thing to Debian, packaged as a Project Treble GSI (so yes, it needs Halium since it coexists with the device-specific kernel build and the usual AOSP early boot environment).
The Furilabs people are literally the Droidian people.
Looking at commit histories, I'd say:
The Furilabs people are literally former Droidian people.
My first time hearing of this and I'm very interested.
Does anyone know if it can run a full desktop mode when docked? Windows phones and some Samsung phones used to be able to do this and it was a neat trick.
I would love to have a phone I could hook up to a hotel TV with a keyboard and use like a lite desktop
I asked this question as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45318229
Answer: no, but they're working on wireless display support.
"USB-C 2.0" in the specs reveals that. DisplayPort Alt Mode requires at least USB 3.0, the PinePhone Pro would be a Linux phone supporting that.
On another note, I've successfully connected to wireless displays (Miracast) on Linux using https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-network-displays
> "USB-C 2.0" in the specs reveals that. DisplayPort Alt Mode requires at least USB 3.0, the PinePhone Pro would be a Linux phone supporting that.
That's not quite accurate IMHO, as the OG PinePhone also supports the feature, despite being USB 2.0. The fact that PINE64 only got it working in PinePhone hardware revision 1.2a maybe also reveals why few phones (whether they support USB 2 or 3.*, e.g., the Pixel 8 was the first Pixel phone to support the feature) actually support DisplayPort Alt Mode: It does not just add cost for parts, but also makes the design more complicated (and may require multiple design iterations to get right, which are expensive).
So: If DisplayPort Alt Mode or somthing like "USB-C video out" is not mentioned, you can usually safely assume that the device does not support it.
the FuriPhone FLX1 was A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket
previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839326
> 6.7" 1600x720
It's probably usable, but dips down below what even extra-cheap Xiaomis and such offer. I really want to see a Linux phone's specsheet that's even a little competitive.
I've always considered it a benefit if they don't spend needless money and waste my battery life on rendering more pixels than I'll ever see.
My eyesight hasn't gotten better and as a teenager the 720p pixel density of the phablet called Galaxy Note 2 was already smaller than I can make out during normal use (i.e. not if I'm actively trying to see if I can make them out)
But sure, higher number sells better, no matter if this actually makes any difference to anyone
If it were just that "higher number sells better" reasoning then it wouldn't make sense the density increases had a pretty hard stop after ~2014. Same with why 8k TV hype died down but 4k TV became mainstream - it's about the genuine limit for a typical person at typical TV viewing distance unless they have an absolutely massive TV.
I always thought Samsung had a clever approach with a toggle to just render at the lower resolution if you wanted the lower rendering load. Then you still only need to develop 1 cutting edge screen with all of the latest improvements but it will please both use cases well as the cost overhead of shipping models 2 separate screens would.
> why 8k TV hype died down but 4k TV became mainstream
People also stop getting eight kids the generation after child mortality plummets. The experience I had until 1080p on computer screens (not 6 inch phones) is that it added sharpness in video reproduction. I can't tell you why people then went for 4k, besides speculating it's the same phenomenon. We've also got a 4k TV simply because there was no additional cost for the featureset we were looking for anyway, and it was the biggest TV we've ever had so it didn't sound weird to have more pixels in it, but indeed, now that I own it, I can say there was no point and I'll not upgrade to a higher pixel density if there were to be a price difference or other downside (like how power draw would show up on the energy label)
Regarding the Samsung rendering thing, is that on TVs specifically? Because I don't think I've noticed that on my Samsung phones, where the impact ought to be more noticeable than for a wall-powered device
> But sure, higher number sells better, no matter if this actually makes any difference to anyone
I'm not sure if I'd call it "making a difference", but I've noticed pixelation at one point on my 5.2" 1080p phone (424 ppi). I'm absolutely not the average person, sure, but higher resolutions are markedly nicer for me. A 16" 4k laptop is significantly crispier than my 13.5" 1500ish p framework screen. Yet you will find people who say that 4k below a 28" monitor size makes no sense.
It's all about how sensitive your eyes are and how much you lean towards the screen like a poorly postured crustacean lol
This is approximately 240 dpi, on par with MacBook retina display's DPI. Should be fine, unless you want to use a magnifying glass.
I agree it won't be awful by any means, but it's relatively meaningless to directly compare DPIs of screens which have different typical viewing distances.
How much different? To me it's approximately the same, a the length of a semi-stretched arm.
It's a testament to Xiaomi's excellence. They're the third global phone maker for a reason.
The size of the Chinese market is an equally important reason.
Why do they keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? Our hands don't grow that fast, most adult males have been struggling using their phone with one hand. Only the vocal minority prefers to oversized phone-computer, most of us just want to use it briefly on the go before tucking it back into the pocket, without it tearing a hole in it (which my last two phones have done).
If anyone is listening -- can you put a cap on the dimensions? 5.5" screen is plenty, if I want the cinema experience I will either a) go to cinema or b) use some VR/AR device, for the rest of use cases, like watching a movie on a bus/plane/train, it doesn't weigh up against carrying a brick with you.
My complaint is also, why do they weight so much? Even phones with the same dimensions of an older one keep increasing their weight. This phone is 201 g, which has become the new normal so I can't complain really much but it's still not the phone for me. And it's about 170 mm tall, which it's huge but sadly normal in 2025.
I haven't thought about it as much as I have about sizes, but you do have an interesting point to ponder. I can only offer an explanation, but no consolation:
I guess electronics has gotten denser, and density for the same volume is what quite literally translates to larger weight. The density thing is because they're able to cram more electronics, as our fabrication technology inches forward (i.e. Intel/TSMC/Nvidia/etc trying to break the 1nm barrier for transistors).
Remember the old Nokia phones, where the plastic shell likely amounted to as much volume that a modern phone instead dedicates to the entire front camera device? The latter will weigh much more than the plastic, for the same volume. Now apply that to _every_ component in the modern phone, and the difference is multiplicative -- there's just more features in every cubic millimeter of the phone today. No wonder it's getting heavier.
I had a phone where the top half of the touch screen broke, so I installed "quick cursor" to be able to access it. I still use it on my new phone since it enables me to control everything using only about 1/3 of the touch screen. This should really come built in to the OS, especially since the app requires some pretty aggressive permissions to work.
Hi, Quick Cursor dev here.
I completely agree with you, my app functionality should be built inside the OS because of better integration, privacy reasons, etc.
I just wanted to add that because of this permissions my app needs in order to work, I will never add the internet permission to Quick Cursor. I took this decission 5 years ago when I started the app because I understood the privacy risk, and my app will never have internet access permission.
In order for an app to have access to internet, it needs to have the android.permission.INTERNET added to its manifest, otherwise it won't work. This can be checked easily, there are some apps that shows you this info about your installed apps, or by manually looking at the AndroidManifest in the .APK of the app.
Thank you for making this!
I am using GrapheneOS, and I think this OS actually also allows you to explicitly toggle the Network permission off for apps that require it, but I did notice that it wasn't even present on the list to begin with :). I also like to disable Network for things like keyboard apps.
I like large screens because I value having plenty of context visible, e.g. in a webpage or a conversation.
Also, don't forget the bigger batteries that large phones enable.
I don't but could you not forget that some people don't have a car. You can walk or use transit in proper cities. When I need a bag then it is not a phone it is a laptop without keyboard.
The context is the same though, regardless of screen size? The UI and/or UX doesn't change much when the screen is physically smaller? The resolution usually stays the same, and even if it shrank or grew, most apps wouldn't care as the libraries used to render their widgets are more or less "resolution invariant".
I mean I get what you're implying, I am just making sure I understand the meaning of "context" here. But if you have large fingers, smaller buttons obviously make the device harder to use, no two ways about it. However, in Android and iOS both, it's possible (for the user) to scale everything up, to help solve that very problem.
The bigger battery argument is a valid one too, but you have to keep in mind that most of the battery is consumed by the screen on average, and larger screen will eat more battery, so it's a bit like the rocket equation -- bigger rocket needs more fuel, more fuel needs more space and adds weight to the rocket, more rocket more fuel again and so on. In terms of batteries and rockets both, there's a golden middle there somewhere, I think. But it's a moving quantity since both screens and batteries are different -- OLED vs LED-lit LCD screen and LiPo vs LiOn for battery and so on. In short: I don't think a 5,5" phone (my preferred size) will suffer from shorter battery life, perhaps on the contrary (vs. a 6,5"). Especially considering that _large_ phones tend to be made _thinner_, since their ergonomics depends more on thickness (for the large width and height), perhaps becoming a problem with more than 8mm thickness, while a 5,5" phone can in fact be used comfortably even if it was 8-10mm thick, since it's smaller in the other two dimensions. That extra afforded thickness can directly translate to a battery that is as large or larger in terms of capacity as one for a 7mm "slick" 6,5" phone.
And can you give a number on the "vocal minority"? Because companies usually sell what customers want and if the majority of the phones on the market is big, then that's what people want.
Hmm, or they fabricate the demand so they can fulfill it. SUVs anyone?
As an outsider, how do they do that?
I am guessing
- put best specs in largest devices (fomo-ish, status symbol) - put highest cost on largest devices (status symbol) - um? not even create smaller devices would also do it I guess?
I mean, the suv case is easy:
- market SUV’s.
- stock dealerships with mostly SUV’s
- complain that nobody is buying non-SUV’s (they can’t, it’s only suv stock),
- stop selling non-SUV models.
- complete transformation into indeterminate, indistinguishable car brand no.3564.
also, government policies that reduce the price of SUVs
The problem isn't that this hypothetical vocal minority is completely imaginary, but that consumers will repeatably gravitate toward the biggest and most glitterliest product. Only few realizes it's not what they want.
The problem isn’t that the majority of phones are big, it’s that virtually all are big and heavy. There is no modern, properly supported smartphone with 4.x” or 5.x” diagonal or below 150 grams anymore.
In all frankness, I think this is the legandary "if people wanted a faster horse..." statement of Henry Ford -- consumers don't always know what they want, and I know quite a few who couldn't confidently answer the question "why did you buy a 6,5" iPhone?" with anything else but "I have used iPhone all my life and this is the size they sell", meaning the consumer doesn't choose much, the choice is to buy a newer iPhone. The simplified argument that goes along "phones are getting larger because consumers want larger phones" is indeed only that -- a very simplified way to look at it. There's much more going on there.
It's very similar to smart TVs. Yes, most people do prefer smart TVs, but vendors use it very successfully to sell inferior displays (poor color, poor contrast etc), to compensate and to pull more selling margin, since that's how the consumer functions (being utterly unable to quantify display quality for an uncalibrated TV). Anyway, I am digressing -- the point of my comparison is that it's complicated and not nearly as simple as "consumers want larger phones / TVs with slow menus and shitty picture as long as there's Netflix in there".
Do smaller phones still exist?
Genuinely asking. I’m on iPhone, which hasn’t changed form factor in quite a while.
Yes, but no "flagship" devices from mainstream brands, only specialty/novelty stuff. The last <6" flagship I'm aware of was the Asus Zenphone 10 in 2023.
Yes and now.
Technically yes: there is iPhone 13 Mini and in Android world there is 2 or 3 Unihertz models and some "no-name" Chinese Aliexpress brands (Cubot has some small model, AFAIR, and there is several even more no-name offers).
Realistically no. All these Android models are underspecced. Old cores (8+ years old), small screen resolutions (small in PPI, not like small as screen proportion to big ones), small amount of RAM and storage (latest Uniherz is happy exception in this area, but not in the others), very bad cameras, very short OS update period (if ever).
iPhone 13 mini is Ok-ish (my wife uses one): camera is still very poor, but all other is usable.
Android is worse. If all you need are phone calls, and messaging with Telegram/Whatsapp/Signal it is Ok. But if you need good camera, good browsing experience (many open tabs) or something specific you are out of luck. Even Google Maps could be sluggish. Plus zero-days in old Android versions.
Good cameras is my pet peeve: good ones go only to flagship models and maybe sub-flagship ones (like, flagship and sub-flagship can be differentiated by addition of tele-module, which is most useful for me).
yes. I use this one https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star
I have a question to you (I've tried to google this up to no luck): which is last official update for Android for Jelly Star? It was released with Android 13, did it get 14? 15? 16?
OS updates looks like pain point for all these non-mainstream phones to me, am I right or it is wrong impression?
Thank you.
You are right, the phone is still on Android 13, I don't think the updates will come
It is what scary me: System needs regular updates not for new shiny features, but for fixed bugs, zero days, etc.
They did try bringing back smaller ~5.5" phones, and hardly anybody bought them.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-mini-sales-a-disast...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
I think the vocal minority is the other way around.
I think your argument is flawed -- perhaps rephrasing it to say is that _Apple_ tried bringing back a smaller _iPhone_ and _presumably_ few _existing_ customers bought them, would have made a better one? Because I would assume most of iPhone buyers are either _existing_ iPhone users, or people who swear to Apple software (iOS, MacOS) so this is about being able to read the statistics correctly.
Add to the above that iPhone "mini" might have been slower or just "worse" and it wasn't just the screen that was reduced in size, so the word of mouth might have been that the phone is simply worse, and that contributed to poor sales.
There's no way of telling how a 5,5" phone would fare until there's consistent prolonged feature-parity based sales of such phones that are otherwise identical to other offerings by the same brand, across multiple brands (if I am a die-hard Fairphone customer, I am not buying an iPhone regardless of screen size) to help gather proper statistics.
As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.
The lowest alternative, 13 Pro Max had double the sale volume (at 1.5x the cost), while the VAST majority chose the 6.1" models instead, how does that support the argument the desire for a >5.5" phone is from a vocal minority? The articles themselves directly state the sales of small models are poor, it's not the other way around no matter how you spin the charts.
The relative preference for the larger unit has increased over time as well, e.g.: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/28/iphone-16-q1-2025-best-...
The markets for smaller phones and the larger Pro Max models look like they’re roughly in the same order of magnitude. It doesn’t look like a negligible demand that is not worth serving.
Poorly optimized apps need big batteries.
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New Linux phone drops
Looks inside
Still the good old A76 and A55 cores (they're 8 years old at this point)
You’re expecting cutting edge tech in something that gets no financial backing to make it practical? That doesn’t seem fair.
What is even more unfair is you making me say something I did not say. Extremely sad that nuance is no longer a part of this world.
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This is not on me.
You chose to interpret that me pointing out the hardware is 8 years old meant I expected cutting edge technology, as if there wasn't 8 years oh hardware innovations in-between the hardware used and "cutting-edge technology". (The A720 and A510 are 4 years old, not exactly cutting-edge but would be a dramatic improvement)
There was nothing to extrapolate. I made a remark on the hardware, and you chose to view the world as black and white ("if he mentions the old age of the hardware he must necessarily expect the brand new cutting edge hardware and must not realize that small indie FOSS projects don't have the same resources as Apple").
You lacked nuance, it is not on me.
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Because both comments you quoted did not put words in my mouth like you did. They can laugh in iPhone all they want, they didn't say I expected iPhone performance out of this Linux phone. Same for the other comment, they're expressing their opinions, not projecting it on me.
You're the one being disingenuous, and I'm done exchanging with you.
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Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not namecalling anyone Dan, I said their behaviour is bad. Which it is for any reasonable standard.
"You're being obnoxious to the highest degree" counts as name-calling in the sense that we use that term here. This is not a borderline call!
You don't think it's obnoxious to aggressively put words in people's mouths and becoming even more aggressive and accusatory when getting some gentle "that's not what I said" pushback on that? Practically no one has an interaction like that and walks away with a positive experience. You can say "your comment would have been better without that remark, don't respond to a bad comment by making a bad comment". Okay, fine. I wouldn't even have responded. But it's really not the "obnoxious to the highest degree"-remark that's the core problem here, it's the "obnoxious to the highest degree"-behaviour. This is exactly how good (non-obnoxious) people stop coming back.
Even if all that is true, "you're being obnoxious to the highest degree" counts as name-calling in the sense that we use that term here and it's not a borderline call. You can make your substantive points without that kind of thing, so please do, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse, so if we rely on those perceptions. we're guaranteed to end up in a downward spiral.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That used to mean couple SI prefixes worse than current gen processors, which was why old equalled useless. Not anymore, so okay.
Well, the CPU is OK for mobile, but the GPU/GPU-driver situation is not. Just look at the Pinephone to see a device with fine CPU performance that struggles with UI. Though, in fairness, some of this could be fixed with more optimized software.
Also still waiting for more userspace tools to support the v4l2-requests API for hardware video decoding.
2x A78 + 6x A55? G68 MC4 GPU.
It's not great but should be pretty usable, spec wise!
As much as I admire the FOSS nature, it's always the problem of underspeccing and overpricing the tech at the same time.
And don't forget _overdimensioning_. Vendors love this because volume scales cubically with increase in any one of width, height and depth -- they're not the ones carrying the phone, but they can pack more features into one, quite literally. FOSS vendors more so since they need more ground to compete on (hardware being older and price being high enough because of economy of scale).
FOSS mobile hardware vendors already have a hard enough niche to target, "people who say they want small phones" is just fuel to the already burning fire for them. Each niche they add does not add the user base together, it multiplies the userbase percentages.
Standard-size phone screens are easier to procure. This determines the dimensions. Same for batteries.
No economies of scale. Niche things will always be more expensive.
Its not the OSS nature. Any product from scratch will be expensive to start with and reduce in price eventually. There is a reason why Tesla didn't start with Model Y first.
Underspeccing is specific to mobile industry. But I agree with you here. Going for premium specs is a better way to start. But they'll have to pick a specs that works for them the company and can reach maximum people. So I also acknowledge that it's tough.
If you are small, there is no way around it if you want to grow.
"overpricing" is often higher cost of parts at lower quantity, future R&D and other costs that are much higher than for big corporation.
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Omfg ! The phone I didn't know I wanted. I've grown so sick of Google's BS with android and their policies. I want a phone that I own and I can hack a little bit.
This is going to be my next phone !
I'm very curious about the Android app support and if by any magic it can do payment. But even if it doesn't it's still going to be an improvement over my pixel
I found more detailed specs here:
https://liliputing.com/flx1s-is-a-new-linux-phone-thats-most...
Shame, it lost a few things.
Does this support connection to a docking station so it can be used like a desktop?
If so, I'm very interested.
Edited to add: some reviews say it supports mouse and keyboard via dock, The Register says it didn't support an external USB-C display (that was from March this year, so the earlier version), but then another review said that used it as an Ethernet router, so Ethernet via dock must work.
I am the Register reviewer.
I tested with 2 different USB-C docks and a USB-C to HDMI monitor cable. They're the only ones I have.
One is from a Gemini PDA and has USB-A, USB-C and Ethernet. I think I did not test Ethernet but I can do that. The dock contains an Ethernet controller: it's a USB-attached Ethernet card, effectively. It works on Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, etc.
As far as I recall the FLX1 detected the Ethernet port but I didn't test it.
The other dock has audio, various sizes of USB, and HDMI out. All the ports worked except display. You can drive the phone with a full sized keyboard and mouse, which is amusing but useless. You can power the phone from the dock while in use.
But it can't drive a display, which is a damned shame and a deal-breaker for the form-factor. Otherwise this could be a real PC in your pocket.
The company told me it was working on wireless display support but I do not own any wireless displays to test with.
Thank you for clarifying, and thanks for your contributions to The Register!
It's most definitely a shame that it doesn't support an external display via the dock (which kinda makes moot the fact it supports other peripherals), I've used two different docks (both requiring DisplayLink drivers) with my home Linux setup and every kernel update is a crapshoot as to whether the dock-connected displays will blink back into life post reboot, or stubbornly stay blank until I roll back to the previous kernel version and await the drivers to catch up.
As such, I kinda understand that it may be harder than expected to get working for a device like this.
Having recently setup a new GrapheneOS device, however, it means I'm less motived to change mobile platforms again. Desktop-via-dock support could have convinced me.
It does mot support display output via USB C, and I'm guessing Ethernet will also be very limited because the usb is 2.0, which is very sad to see on a Linux phone.
I wish someone with with money would just make a deal with a niche Chinese company like blackview or oukitel to allow making a Linux for their hardware. Not trying to make the same stuff as everyone does as it will be niche for quite a while.
It is a mistake to not offer a separate switch for GPS. It means you can't use a map without turning on your cellular modem.
What does the 's' at the end signify? Has the hardware been revved?
(I've been waiting for something like this for perhaps a decade. Now it's here and I don't have enough work to afford it. :-/)
My best guess would be "slim" as the flx1 is quite bulky and looking at the spec, this one is a little bit less large but suite thinner.
Product info: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920071806/https://furilabs....
https://www.topcpu.net/en/cpu-c/mediatek-dimensity-900-vs-ap...
1/3 to 1/2 of the performance of an Apple A18.
So, perfectly serviceable, then.
LIkely, as long as you aren't playing any demanding games or anything
If all you want is a smartphone that runs Linux- this will do the job. But it's hardly serviceable when banking apps won't run on it.. and you're sure to get sub-par performance on anything else on top of the slow chip.
I'm excited about this. But it still seems like pixel hardware plus grapheneos is a better option? This is a question.
At the moment GrapheneOS is better for more people. It's secure, reliable and polished. But in the long run the continued development of Linux phones and getting away from the current duopoly is definitely a good thing.
I'm using GrapheneOS now, and will switch to a Linux phone when the basics are nailed down and the price is reasonable.
Define "better".
With a de-Googled Android device you get lots more apps, but it's still Android.
This is Debian atop an Android kernel, with Android in a container. The native OS is a desktop Linux. You can upgrade your OS with `apt update ; apt-get full-upgrade -y`.
If you want a pocket Linux phone, I think it's about the best.
“Buying Google products” is never a better option.
Maybe, but I think that's a conclusion for an individual to reach rather than a piece of information to help them decide.
Why? It's not like any of them is completely open-source hardware, so why bother?
Pixels have decent hardware and have an open-bootloader. I'm fairly sure your desktop is not better/worse than that either.
I like buying used. I feel better about that. Maybe that is misguided.
Looks interesting. Posh is a bit too adventurous for me (I wish there was a smartphone running FOSS android out of the box)
MurenaOS? Runs just fine on the Fairphones.
Do you mean "phosh"?
Personally, I'd rather to buy a Google Pixel and then install GrepheneOS. But, it depends on your budget and willingness to sacrifice features.
As much as I'm interested in running Linux on my next mobile device, I'm not inclined to trust a single company to provide both the device and the OS. I have no reason to distrust Furi Labs, but trust is earned, not granted.
First of all, why is there so little documentation about "FuriOS"? What exactly has Furi Labs changed from the base Debian system to warrant a rebadging? Why can't I know which software it's using? Why are there so few screenshots and videos of the device (besides from the "volunteered" reviews)?
I understand that selling hardware is how they recoup their development costs, and focusing on a single device allows them to deliver a better user experience. But I would still like to try their OS on a device I may already have, before I decide to shell out $550 for, frankly, pretty lackluster hardware.
Interesting since Apple and Goog both ship their OS on their hardware.
It's Debian with Phosh and Halium (Android drivers) installed to an older ubiquitous Android handset. Not perfect but a compelling shortcut. Distros have been created with less differentiation.
First Linux phone in a while that is not a decade behind hardware wise. This one is only perhaps half that, haha. My iPhone 6s is still snappy however, so it should be fine.
The website is down from all the visitors at the moment.
Anyone here can share their experience with the phone?
We desperately need Linux phones to succeed, especially in the current geopolitical situation. Not everybody lives in a country aligned with either the US (Apple/Google) or China (Xiaomi etc.).
Why Ubuntu touch, it was discontinued right?
You're partially correct. Ubuntu Touch was discontinued by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) in April 2017.
However, Ubuntu Touch was picked up by the UBports project (that by now has their own foundation) and has been continued to this day. Currently they are preparing a Ubuntu Touch release based on Ubuntu 24.04 (moving on from Ubuntu 20.04). See https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/ for more.
Regarding the FLX1(s): FuriLabs worked on a way to support Ubuntu Touch apps (that can be found at https://open-store.io/) natively on FuriOS. It's also possible to boot Ubuntu Touch on their FLX1 hardware.
It says "The FLX1s from Furi Labs runs a fully optimized Linux system called FuriOS", never heard of FuriOS but seems they're not using Ubuntu Touch, at the very most it's a fork of it.
It is not. It is unrelated except that they have a shared ancestor in Debian.
my bad I got confused by this in their website >Multi-Boot Ubuntu Touch, other OS and KVM virtualization
It looks pretty good! If they come out with one that includes a headphone jack I'll be sold
The previous model had a headphone jack, and a better spec or two.
That industrial design sure looks familiar...
Is Furi supposed to be pronounced like fury or furry?
> Furi is pronounced “Fury”. FuriOS is pronounced “Furious”. We simply couldn’t afford the Fury part of the domain names.
https://furilabs.com/faq/
Although it makes me think of pronouncing like FLCL.
Happy it has multi-boot. Not a buyer, but it's a feature I intend to keep my eye on.
Furi is such a dreadful name
Hug of death :(
how does that happen btw? like it's understandable when a website is hosted on a vape (lol), but even a cheap vps should be able to handle like 10-20k views in the span of a couple hours (which is the max load from HN i'm assuming), unless you're hosting video or some such
It depends! You can make a website with a static text file or you can make a video run as the background. There are more ways to mess it up than to get it right, actually.
> how does that happen btw?
People write their sites in slow languages "because it's I/O bound anyway" and put content which could easily be static in a DB.
I'm doing a bit of WordPress work lately, and the whole server freezes while it responds to a single HTTP request for several seconds. If you open a bunch of links in new tabs, you can watch them load one by one, for the next 20-30 seconds.
A slow DB. If you were to use Redis as a backing store…
Then you’d almost certainly be overcomplicating things, but it shouldn’t be slow.
Slow? But this site should have been written in just html and CSS
I should clarified in my original message. The shop page was hugged.
Serve even statical pages with direct DB access on every hit, using some slow and bloated JS/Python backend, and voila.
I use a blog that does three 'direct' (do you mean synchronous?) database queries for every pageview. Language was PHP5 (I feel like 7 got a lot faster but didn't do benchmarks so idk). Standard WAMP stack, renders in about 35 milliseconds on 2001 (sic) hardware iirc, and the HN homepage is very comfortably under 10 requests per second, so it's idling most of the time.
Database queries and interpreted languages aren't an issue at all. You need to be majorly unprepared to not be able to handle HN load. What I think people might overlook is that there will be other news outlets and social media that link to their website also. So it's hard to pass a verdict, though someone mentioned it's WordPress in a sibling comment so... I'd put my money on that it's poorly optimised but we can't really know I guess
One of my things was briefly on the front page, I got ~15k views in about 10 minutes. That was a few years ago, might be different now.
Static sites are not that popular, generally speaking.
Anyone competent can put a static site up on CF pages or even a lame VPS and serve huge amounts of traffic just fine. That’s not what they do.
It's a WordPress site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250920113525/https://furilabs....
Actually useful archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920071806/https://furilabs....
> The FLX1s from Furi Labs runs a fully optimized Linux system called FuriOS, packing a lightning fast user interface, 3 hardware switches for microphone, camera and modem/gps, and a privacy centric approach like no other.
Seems to be working fine.
https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1s
"Error establishing a database connection"
So it only works fine if you don't care what a FLX1s is.
The whole site was fast and responsive for me, this page included.
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Another expensive phone... sorry but the price is 3x of my phone which has 6Gb RAM (compared to 8 Gb here) and the same number of cores, maybe less performant but who cares, I am not planning to do machine learning on a phone anyway. Also mine has better screen resolution despite lower price.
Yes the firmware is non-free, but I have kernel sources so I can either try to port a open-source OS on it, or simply reverse-engineer and patch the existing firmware.
Also I am not sure if Linux desktop environment (Wayland, Pipewire and friends) is a good choice. Why not use AOSP, which is free, has everything, is optimized, has lot of f-droid apps and is tested on millions of devices? It has modern languages like Kotlin, and GUI frameworks like Flutter. And are there mobile apps for standard Linux desktop?
> Whether used for coding, ... designing, or multitasking with everyday apps, our device delivers the performance
Sorry, I don't think small screen with tiny keyboard is any good for coding or design. Smartphone is only good for taking/watching photos, reading or chatting.
Modern(ish) languages like Rust, Python, and Kotlin support Linux. Flutter as well.
ssh also exists, for development and other things.
There is a difference between a programming language support and having complete GUI framework, set of libraries and applications. Also what would you use to write GUI for Linux? Non-reactive libraries are not an option due to being outdated and inefficient programming style.
It is one thing if AOSP has some fundamental issues that cannot be patched/fixed, and another thing if someone just doesn't like it.
Gtk and Qt have been making mobile apps for years, possibly a decade. Flutter is newer but works well already. Kivvy was a competitor for a while.