When I unboxed my new, orange Jolla phone, I remembered the long forgotten FirefoxOS phone. I liked it…
It's too bad firefoxOS is gone. I loathe android more and more by the day.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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it still exists, as the closed-source KaiOS. lots of feature phones use it. the first one post-shutdown was the nokia 8110 re-imagining, nicknamed the "bananaphone" because it's curved and yellow, which led to the creation of the bananahackers community.
also, since current feature phones are more powerful than the smartphones of yesteryear, it's lead to the hilarious situation that this is the most powerful firefox os phone you can buy today.
Me too. Mozilla abandoned it right before Progressive Web Apps started taking off. It was just poor timing. If they had held on a little longer or started the project a little later, Firefox OS would likely have been a viable alternative. It would not be competing with iOS or Android in terms of market share, but I could see it being comparable to Windows Phone whose downfall was due to Microsoft completely changing the developer frameworks with every new version.
I liked the idea of it. I never had the privilege of using it. If Chrome can be an OS, I don't see why Firefox couldn't, since Netscape (what we used to call Firefox in the 90s... sorta) had a bunch of apps (email, what became Thunderbird I think?, web page composer, maybe another tool).
On the other hand, a browser shouldn't be an OS, but if Mozilla were to sponsor a Linux distro that includes Firefox and Thunderbird, that would be nice. Plus give it appropriate theming.
Android as mobile Linux was a fine idea that was never executed very well. As a Mac guy, I wish Apple took its mobile lead with more responsibility, and shaped the iPhone (and especially iPad) to be more like the Mac. But they got greedy, and Google was never altruistic. I just don't really have a ledge to stand on when I say Google wasn't, because iPhone never really was either. The distinction of being made by a storied computer company rather than an advertising company is almost completely lost when you look at the App Store. I think if the iPhone was made with the spirit behind the old days of OS X, things would be different. The want to make something great that is also elegant. Meanwhile, the Android/Linux side should have been pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Both, for example, should be almost completely usable via terminal. And then Windows Mobile/Windows Phone should have been what iPhone became — the phone for everybody else, easy to use, with AI assistants, ads, sponsored content, and whatnot. But more app compatibility. I basically wish phones followed the computers that inspired them more closely.
Indeed. All I really need is a Linux distro with FF and data sync at times. With the advances of immutable distros, this would be great!
There is all the management stuff and web apps Google built for ChromeOS, so FFOS would probably be a lot more work than it sounds.