Just submitted version three of my patch series to the kernel mailing list.

It enables a couple of things for the Xperia 10 III: flash, Wifi, Bluetooth, ... :D

Still not a usable phone, but it's a lot of work that I sitting in front of me, so it'll likely take a lot of time to make this a useful device... If anyone wants to help making a small Linux phone phone with mainline kernel support, waterproof case and a headphone jack a reality... :p

All this mainlining stuff isn't actually very hard, it's mostly trying to figure out how stuff works and a lot of trial and error. At least with my approach of enabling all components that have drivers (most of them) and leaving the rest for the future and other contributors. The device trees of similar devices are very helpful examples as well.

Also, I'm testing with Mobian, these patches has not been tested with Nura yet (which is why the wiki doesn't show those things as supported), so that's also where someone could help out. :D

I've summarised it all - in a way that's easier to read - on my own repo: https://git.erebion.eu/forgejo/erebion/pdx213-temp

This work was assisted by... my brain. I don't need lying chat bots for this, I can think. I prefer to do it the slow and sustainable way, the one that'll pay off much more when this thing is well-supported and will be able to run Linux for years.

Not so long ago, I made a post here about joining Mobile Linux club with my Pixel 3a XL. Back then, some people (shoutout to @Shatur@discuss.tchncs.de) asked me to share my experience after a while of use.

A lot of it will apply to all mobile Linux, while some points are rather device-specific.

There we go!

Quick recap of the setup

• Phone: Google Pixel 3a XL (google-bonito)
• OS: Nura (formerly known as postmarketOS) v26.06 - stable
• DE: Plasma Mobile

The Good

• All phone features do work. Calls, SMS, Mobile data are all operational. Calls do wake up the phone, as intended.
• Wireless connectivity works great. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are fully functional, and my Bluetooth headphones connect just fine (and there's even a Linux-native app for them made by a cool person!).
• Battery life, particularly idle, is incredible. On idle, the Pixel battery lasts almost a week, and it does survive a day of moderate use.
• The collection of mobile-friendly Linux apps is larger than I expected. Many other apps can also work with simple workarounds, like putting the phone in landscape mode. Support of common open-source media software (Navidrome, Jellyfin...) is very good.
• The controls are mostly intuitive to any Android user. Plasma didn't reinvent the wheel here: for the most part, the controls are instantly familiar. There are some annoying exceptions, though, like using swipe up to close apps, but somehow not the app drawer.
• The design is consistent and customizable. You can have all the same icons and menus as in desktop Plasma, and yet somehow they sit just right in the mobile phone design. You can customize the look with third-party styles, colors and icons, many of which are available both for desktop and for mobile. This way, I can get uniform design between both my PC and my phone, which is mind-blowing at first.
• Waydroid support is built in. You can run Android apps out of the box. There are limitations - not every app will work right, and running Waydroid in the background drains a lot of battery - but most Android apps run well and even send notifications to the main notifications menu.
• It is Linux, just the way you know it. If something works in desktop Linux, it should work here too. For example, I recently switched the mirrors (more on that later) through CLI and it reflected in Discover app store. I can type "sudo reboot" - and it does indeed reboot. All those little things work here. It's Linux, you already know it.
• SSH support. You can easily SSH to your phone and do whatever you want. Awesome if you run a mobile server, very useful when you just want to manage your phone from your computer. Works very well.

The Neutral

• Linux phone is boring - but intentional. It is there to do exactly what you tell it to. Answer emails? Done. Check messages? Alright. Make a call? No problem. Launch a game? Will do. Much in the spirit of Linux philosophy, the phone will do exactly what you tell it to - and not a tiny bit more. Combine that with the same philosophy on the side of apps, as well as limited entertainment options - and you get a very, very boring phone. For many, it will be a huge advantage - but if you're used to randomly binge on your phone for a bit of entertainment - this ain't it. You'll only address this phone with a clear intent of doing something.
• There are things about design philosophy that do differ from Android - and not everyone will like it. For example, when you invoke one app from the other on Android, you have to go back to the source app, while on Plasma it opens as a "new window" and you can select the source in the active app menu. There is also no system-wide way to go "back", and the respective gestures don't exist. Overall, I like Android way more, but there are neat features here, too.

The Bad

• The phone feels sluggish. I don't know whether it's specific to Nura, Plasma, or if it's just Pixel 3a being old, but the system often doesn't feel snappy at all. It doesn't freeze, but something doesn't feel right.
• Some software is very limited. Nura in particular is based on Alpine, which is already not the first pick for a mobile/desktop distro. Add ARM to the mix, and you have a very poor selection of certain applications. For example, I could not find VPN software that would work on this phone in my heavily controlled jurisdiction. And it's just my personal pain point - there's plenty of software that simply isn't available.
• Notifications are hit or miss. Often times, notifications didn't come from inactive apps until I opened them. This made me miss important messages, and it is unacceptable for such a device.
• Some features need fiddling. For example, mobile data didn't work out of the box or with the GUI settings, so I had to dive into setting the modem via CLI. It worked at the end, though.
• Browser options are generally quite bad. Browsing on mobile Linux is generally less than enjoyable. Angelfish is almost good enough, and the rest falls short very quickly.
• Official mirrors can be geographically restricted. As postmarketOS changed name and domain to Nura (nura.eco), their new domain effectively blocked me out. Combine that with lack of VPNs - and it made me change to alternative mirrors to restore update functionality. Given that these are official mirrors, this is not great.

Overall, it was a blast the first week I played around with it, but after the novelty had subsided, all the unpolished and raw parts of the system have hit me quite hard. Now, I'd rather quickly pop my Android phone to do what I actually want to do, and keep Linux phone for experimenting and helping some development. The system feels like it's still far from prime time, but I'm happy I tried nonetheless. The enthusiast part of me is satisfied.

We'll see how it goes from then on.

What is your experience daily driving Linux on a phone? Is there anyone with mightier devices running the system, or Mobian/other Linux enthusiasts? How is Linux working for you?

I've owned a Pinephone Pro since launch, and have tried to daily drive it on and off for years with limited success. It's sitting in a drawer at the moment because echo cancellation doesn't work on phone calls regularly.

Anyways, I have a Pixel 3a sitting around that needs a battery replacement, but I wanted to ask here if anyone else is running Linux on it? And if so, how is the experience? I've been using Linux for decades, so I have no problem working around quirks, but I just want a Linux phone I can text and make phone calls on. I really don't have too many advanced app needs other than podcasts and web browsing.

Thanks in advance to anyone that replies.

The rationale is interesting. I'm glad they kept the logo as it's recycling ♻️

Written by community member paint-attract-repeat, he details his experience with the FLX1s

The TL;DR version of this is that FLX1s is a Linux phone which has moved from being of interest to techie enthusiasts to working as an everyday phone - and computer - for a non-tech person.

[…]I describe myself as a "Linux enthusiast". I'm not a Linux novice, I've used it for about a decade. But I am only an end-user of Linux. I'm one of those people the more techie types are writing the software for, and I appreciate you all very much, and contribute (financially) where I can. I can't write software myself, I happily install software that is packaged ready to install, but drop out of the game if I have to "compile" it myself - I don't really understand what that means - let alone write it or code it myself.[…]

You might wonder why I got into Linux? I run my own small business. And I too frequently in the early days (it's 20 years old this year) got my fingers burned when big tech companies were able to hold me to ransom. One particular story that sticks in my mind - not that I'm bitter 😂 - is that we invested in Skype Phones and a Skype number for our telephony. And after Microsoft bought Skype, it decided it wasn't interested in going down that path, and a software update literally remotely bricked all the hardware we had purchased... I became determined I needed as far as possible, to understand, and to have control over, my own tech. And of course, to have nothing to do with Microsoft.

When I unboxed my new, orange Jolla phone, I remembered the long forgotten FirefoxOS phone. I liked it…

This might be particularly useful in the US/Canada where the Pixel line is almost the only phone line that can be bootloader unlocked and where VoLTE is required essentially everywhere if you actually want to use your phone as a phone.

There's an Ubuntu Touch test image for the Pixel 5 with VoLTE if anyone has an old phone sitting around that they want to test with.

See [https://forums.ubports.com/topic/12584/google-pixel-5-redfin]

947,807 views Premiered May 3, 2025 #linux #raspberrypi #diy
This is how (and why) I made my own, fully functional wearable cellphone with a Raspberry Pi Zero and how I bypassed both the law and every single restriction in a school network with it!
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So, after following the discussions for quite a while, I decided to pull it off.

Having gone though the support list of various distributions, I chose Pixel 3a for my setup. Among the dirt cheap smartphones, it seems to enjoy the support of almost everything.

I decided to install PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile. In the meanwhile, I also tested Mobian (didn't work for me for some reason) and Gnome (I ended up being too much of a KDE fanboy).

The overall experience is, honestly, mixed. It sure is exciting, and I've spent a whole day tinkering here and there (and feeling a bit nostalgic for the day I felt this way about Linux as a whole), the hardware support was a pleasant surprise, up to multipoint Bluetooth TWS headphones, but still, system stability isn't anywhere near a daily driver, and software support lags behind in many ways.

In any case, now I too have a platform to look into the future. Year of Linux mobile, anyone? :)

P.S. Any advice on censorship-resistant (VLESS/Reality/AmneziaWG-based) VPNs for PostmarketOS on ARM devices?

This makes Gajim actually usable on mobile devices.

chelydra is a GUI interface for starting and stopping snapclient.

It's an MVP -- it's the bare minimum to do what I need it to do, which is provide a toggle to start and stop snapclient. It's Go & gioui - gioui is a fabulous library, but it doesn't provide drop-downs so until I hack up my own you have to manually enter the correct values in text fields.

This is meant for phones. It's laid out assuming limited screen space in portrait mode. It's a single binary, although the package contains a .desktop and icon so it shows up in a launcher. It uses almost no CPU, as you'd expect.

Importantly, I do build packages, and there are arm64 .debs that can be downloaded and installed -- I think all of the mobile Linuxii are debian-based. You can find a link to the assets on the project page. I have only an FLX1s to test on, but I'm cross-compiling on an amd64 and there shouldn't be anything particularly coupled with FuriOS.

I don't use AI, and none was involved in chelydra. It's, like, 81 LOC... why would there be?

An Aside

Mobile Linux doesn't benefit much from the vast library of software available to most Linuxes; some of this is because a majority of GUI programs are designed for landscape windows with a lot of real estate for multiple panels, menus, and so on. A second reason is because a lot of stuff still doesn't compile cleanly for arm64, which is what most mobile phones have in them. And oddly, when I do find projects, many of them don't provide binaries for some reason, and it can be difficult to gather the requirements to compile binaries for arm. Consequently, I'm constantly running into situations where I need some little program for which there are dozens of options for the desktop and yet none for my phone. I've started putting them here -- there are only two at the moment, but there will be more.

VLC works well on mobile, but the UI is not great for that.

Can it be configured to work well on mobile, such as with mobile-config-firefox and mobile-config-thunderbird?

I like having the Chromecast compatibility for example. I've watched a video streamed from my Mobian phone to a Chromecast (from a Samba share) including conversion to another format and it just worked.

Now I'd like to have improved UI, as I'm not aware of other apps that implement the API for casting to a Chromecast.

How's the experience? I tried it on fp4 1-2 years ago, and it was pretty unstable for daily driving at the time. I returned to android for a while, and now I'm running PostmarketOS on this. It works reasonably well, but phone call audio doesn't work yet (speakers altogether started working just earlier this year) and that's kind of a dealbreaker. The development is also slow, as all the work is done by a single person (huge kudos to Luca Weiss).

So I'm thinking to maybe give Ubuntu Touch a shot. Tell me your experiences with it on a fp4.

Bonus question: wireguard is pretty important to my day-to-day life. Is it yet working? I remember that it was broken, couldn't install it due to something about drivers... There were workarounds, none of them worked on a fp4.

I just ordered a FairPhone 5 for the purpose of test-driving any reasonable Linux solutions on it. My eventual preference will probably be Mobian or Postmarket OS with plasma-mobile, but those appear to require additional dev time before they're practical daily drivers, especially on the FP5. Ubuntu Touch appears to be a reasonably mature option, and they specifically single out the FairPhone 5 on their website as the best supported hardware right now. I believe this maturity may be largely due to utilizing closed source Android blobs to drive phone hardware which isn't ideal for us FOSS purists but at least has the advantage of accelerating their dev efforts.

I assume this won't become my main phone right away, but I'm curious whether this community believes Ubuntu Touch (or something else) on a FP5 could potentially be a reasonable daily driver by now. A similar post from about year ago answered No, though their question didn't specify which hardware.

Thoughts? Maybe an alternate distro I should at look at for the FP5 specifically?

This might be useful to some people that want to use a DHL Packstation, but use a Linux phone and don't want to run the proprietary app in Waydroid.

Waydroid has been packaged and is now available in Unstable: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/waydroid

It should be available in Testing in a few days.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46776421

Title. I made a space to try and encapsulate all the known Linux Mobile Projects. Ideally this could've been a list or directory of sorts, but since I didn't find one, I kinda just decided to make one. - it's inspired by postmarketOS' space.

You can find it at #mobile-linux-rooms:nope.chat -- Could've had a better name but frankly couldn't think of a better name at the time.

Includes

• PostmarketOS
• NixOS (whole)
• Mobian (Unofficial Space made for this)
• Droidian
• UBPorts
• Fedora PocketBlue
• OpenSUSE Mobile
• SailfishOS (Unofficial Space made for this)
• Pine64 (whole)
• KDE (whole)
• Phosh
• Gnome Mobile (room only)

Finally got around to getting a cheap SIM to play around with secondary devices. I threw it into my Ubuntu Touch OnePlus Nord N10 for fun and was absolutely shocked to see that VoLTE worked and calls worked perfect! Last I looked VoLTE was still in heavy development and far off. This is awesome, and the biggest hurdle to daily driving UT in the USA as we can only call on VoLTE.

Now RCS support would be awesome but I'm not sure if that's doable.

how would I go about disabling the modem and nfc on my Oneplus 6T (SDM845) running Mobian? or postmarketOS, I go back and forth between them.

I mean power it off completely, the way "Airplane mode" works on Android, but still be able to use Wifi and BT.

rfkill doesn't list it, lsusb/lspci don't work over here. shutting down ModemManager service removes everything modem related but I want it powered down completely.

If it matters, I'm on Plasma Mobile currently, but I'll switch back to a Phosh image.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35320913

The Movuan project was started by community member lxb and announced in a forum post as an alternative to mobile distributions using the systemd init system. Thanks to being forked from Mobian, the project makes use of modified Mobian debos to build it’s images.

Movuan offers an image based on Devuan 5.0 (Debian 12) with Phosh.

Devuan for users who are unaware is a fork of Debian which provides alterative init systems to Systemd such as:

• sysvinit (default)
• openrc
• runit
• sinit
• s6
• shepherd