Linux phones are getting closer and closer to usability every day. I don't care that they'll always be less polished than iOS or Android, I want a Linux phone.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I've been curious about Linux phones. Can you recommended any devices or operating systems to watch? Thanks.
Your best bet right now IMO would be flashing PostmarketOS onto a used OnePlus 6, which is cheap, has good specs and none of the battery issues plaguing the Pinephone Pro. That said, it's not 100% ready to be a phone yet- for now its best use case is as a mini-tablet / PDA kind of thing. Really feels like carrying a pocket laptop around, which is pretty fun as a starting point.
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Pinephone has a great active community, and the device itself is dirt cheap (also pretty low-specced). There's a pro version with a much better specs in theory, but development state is much rougher. Not that the basic model is anywhere near daily driver material yet, but the progress is very appreciable every time i check in.
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Wine + Wayland for sure. It's time to let X11 rest, it's earned it.
Its all finished, the main developer is porting the source code by patches so its easier for the MR to get accepted by the Wine devs.
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Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we're getting close to having at least one that's usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.
I'm just disappointed in the direction of UX they're all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn't happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I'm not excited to use one.
I don't know if it's just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.
As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven't changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I'm excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.
How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We've all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don't believe for a second that it's the best way.
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I am looking forward to Wayland being a problem free experience. Well, rather, I don't care if it's X11 or Wayland, I don't want have to think about the underlying system.
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Two things at completely opposite ends of the “Linux world”:
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eBPF. It seems super promising for improving observability and security; especially performance of these concerns. It also strikes me as a risky architectural decision. Programmable privileged kernel code + JIT. What could go wrong… that validator sure is doing heavy lifting.
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Valve flexing more muscle in developing Proton as it comes to terms with the fact Microsoft’s vertical integration (and monopolistic practices increasingly unfettered by government) will eventually be an existential risk to it. It is now ridiculously easy to install and run so many games on Linux, so long as you accept the devil you know and it’s DRMy platform. Definitely not perfect but it’s so vastly improved I’m comfortable calling it “night and day”
The Valve one has been the most exciting for me. AFAIK Valve has been thinking about the issues with Windows controlling PC gaming since Windows 8 first came out. The Steam Machines were a flop at the time but in recent years they've been able to maks big moves for Linux gaming and instead of giving up has been doubling down on the importance of it.
Ahh yes the Steam Machines. Definitely contemporaneous with windows 8.
I think it’s likely Valve have intensified efforts recently for a number of reasons but not least of which is the ongoing encroachment of Microsoft turning the Windows PC experience into more of a walled garden across more segments. It can’t have gone unnoticed that Microsoft are 1) selling games on the Microsoft Store and 2) are normalising the concept of hardware root of trust etc with the windows 11 TPM requirement.
EFI secure boot was one thing. Setting conditions up so every PC in the world has hardware support for verifying that user space programs are signed by Microsoft is another. I’m not saying overnight they’ll flick a switch and every windows installation in the world is on S mode. But it’s clearly trending that way. That would be good night for Steam if they so chose. And clearly Microsoft believe they can fob off regulators well enough
RiscV laptops and precompiled binaries in package managers.
My dream is to have a RISC-V phone running Linux
RISCV laptops, with battery that can handle 3 days of juice, doing work. And should be powered by linux, either Fedora or it's derivative (imho)
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A fully working Linux Phone with good battery life that supports a good matrix client with e2 encryption. GrapheneOS is good, but we need initiatives independent from Google.
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Better tools for graphic design. Maybe a port of the Affinity suite or a big push towards GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus development. GIMP... I feel like people dreamed for more than a decade for essential photo editor functionalities like CMYK support and non-destructive editing. At least the first one is coming in the next version(partially).
I switched my design workflow to FLOSS tools exclusively. Krita is a perfectly competent photoshop replacement, Inkscape has been developed at a breakneck pace in the past year, the workflow is different, but it's every bit as good as illustrator, and Scribus is great once you get used to the workflow. If anything, Scribus' workflow helps you plan and structure your projects better. IMHO FLOSS tools are absolutely ready for professional work, but you cannot expect the workflow to match ~~existing~~ proprietary tools.
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HDR and wide color gamut! While the displays are still only really available in the mid to high end (I don't count HDR400), it's no longer just pro gear and I upgraded to a new display recently that I'd love to take advantage of it with. I've been using the new, still in testing Variable Refresh Rate on GNOME and this would be the final piece of the puzzle for making me ditch windows 100% when it comes to gaming, as Proton has basically solved every other issue for me - I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer.
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bcachefs; I currently use zfs and am not a huge fan of btrfs. Having another filesystem mainlined will be fun.
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eBPF, particularly if somebody picks up after the presumably abandoned bpfilter.
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Improved/matured support for rust written drivers. I'm not so fussed about in-tree work, but future third party drivers being written in a safer language would be a nice benefit.
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long term: the newly introduced accelerator section of the kernel might make SoCs with NPUs and the like have better software support.
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very hyped for plasma 6, and Cosmic both. I've got a lot of confidence in KDE devs, and Cosmic previews look very nice.
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NixOS has been a really cool distro for a while, but it also looks to have a solid build system from which interesting derivatives will show up.
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Looking forward to seeing Cosmic get a alpha/beta release, I love what they've shown and since I can never get used to tiling window managers, it looks like a very nice middle ground between DE/WM. And seeing their Virgo laptop, I doubt I'll get one since EU shipping is a nightmare (Though they're supposed to open an EU warehouse soon-ish), but more repairable laptops, esp. one using GPLv3 for every bit, is amazing. Looking forward to seeing more about the FW16, not linux per se, but still cool.
Plasma 6, ofc. Way, way in the future (Probably) is seeing more DEs make their way to Wayland, like XFCE/Cinnamon/Budgie
AMD is planning to release OpenSIL in 2027, which should, in theory, accelerate the development of Coreboot and Libreboot and bring them to modern AMD motherboards
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IIRC the next few Wayland updates this year will solve and improve a lot of problems.
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More/better atomic distros, like Silverblue, Kinoite, VanillaOS, etc. Silverblue is already excellent, easy to use and extremely solid, but there are still some odd rough edges that I think would make it less appealing to new users. When we can offer newbies a personally unbreakable Linux system that does basically everything they want and more, then I think it'll be easy to recommend. At this point it's hard to imagine going back to a traditionally updated distro.
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The next steps for PipeWire, which has improved and streamlined audio (and sometimes video) handling and production immensely. I can imagine a future where we can easily send, audio, video, midi, and all kinds of other data streams between arbitrary programs on Linux, easily routing things with GUI frontends, having connections establish automatically, etc. I don't know how much this stuff is in the works, but I think PipeWire has a ton of potential left to be explored.
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HDR and HDMI 2.1 support would be nice.
Some TVs don't have display ports eh.
And maybe we wanna enjoy 7.1 audio on our fancy ATMOS setups.
Flatpaks seaminglessly supporting all apps plus cli applications and drivers would be the holy grail.
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Functional fractional scaling on GNOME.
I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.
Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don't care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.
Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I'm really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a "tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don't do anything" option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.
I'm also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn't really get tearing ever.
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The ever-improving ecosystem for NixOS as a desktop environment.
I switched over to Nix around a month ago, and in that time I've already seen several guides and sources of documentation improve themselves significantly. I could see NixOS documentation eventually becoming almost as impressive as the Arch Wiki, and it seems that process is in hyperdrive right now.
SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.
*freed from Microsoft's monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.
They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it's folder and run rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.
Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn't happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.
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X12
pop os new de
If you're not familiar with Linux and distros, this reads like a foreign language lol
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Android app support, MacOS-grade font rendering, Graphical systemd manager A quick way to scroll to top (on iPhone you can double tap the status bar to jump to top in ANY app)
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I can’t wait for HDR support so I can finally fully ditch windows. I’ve become so used to it that I can’t go without it.
I'm looking forward to XFCE/Wayland.
I started Linux 2 years ago, and learned a lot, but never bothered learning about X11 because I figured it would be a waste of time.
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- Nix (OS, the package manager, and the language) having excellent and exhaustive documentation.
- It being so easy to use that my grandmother could use it. Heck, a GUI to handle packages would be amazing!
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XFCE Wayland would be pretty sweet. Also native night mode whenever they add that.
Easy fractional scaling on sway
KDE Plasma 6 for the resolution of so many issues; COSMIC DE as a brand new choice in the future; Guix System to have KDE and more packages shipped because it's literally the best designed distro as of now.
Personally, I’m looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE’s port to Qt 6.
Well, I think a lot of us are in the same boat.
Also, the flatpak development (Im not included in this but a lot of ppl is)
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Proton and wine for sure
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