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@solene@bsd.networkAnyone using a Linux based operating system on their smartphone?
I'm looking for feedback about SailfishOS, Murena, PureOS, UBPorts, PostmarketOS, or any other OS that are not android based. Like, are you happy of it? Are you limited by it?
My own smartphone is about to die, I'd like to avoid Android as I never really enjoyed it (I'm running LineageOS).
@boo_@solene I'm running Ubuntu Touch on my Fairphone 4. It's a little less practical than Android (even with Waydroid), sure, but I find it so much more enjoyable. I'm mostly fine with being able to call, chat, browse the web, and use a terminal, so it works for me. And for banking and public transport I can run those in Waydroid, which I can start and stop pretty quickly to save battery.
Also, having an OS which is not built to get your attention the same way that one built by an advertising company is, is really refreshing and nice.
You get nice deep sleep with notifications with Ubuntu Touch (which I gather is not universal among distros), but it does sometimes feel a bit limited by the fact that it depends on working around some Android-blobs via Halium for my specific device, for example, wired USB-C headphones are a little wonky at the moment, but I can listen to music/podcasts with them with a simple pulseaudio tweak.
@boo_@im-in.space@solene VoLTE and 5G are in testing atm and supposedly work well, but I'm gonna look into that more when I have a bit more time. Right now it's not a big concern for me to drop to 3G for calls.
@boo_@solene I feel like I should give an update here, as my experience with Ubuntu Touch has been more mixed recently. Apps are somewhat hit and miss, with many things like Matrix and Signal just really not working well. For Matrix, I have an old version of Cinny for notifications, and the web-app for actually communicating. The QTWebEngine version is quite old at this point with no update in sight before the OTA for 24.04 arrives. Waydroid drains quite a bit of battery.
I'm really trying not to be too negative here. There is still good stuff, but I just feel like I need to balance what I've said previously. If there's one thing that I feel has marked my experience so far, it's that Ubuntu Touch is quite different from other mobile GNU(like)/Linux distros, which seems to incur quite a lot bigger of a maintenance burden, which, combined with a lack of volunteers, makes for an experience which has parts of it which are hard to swallow at this time for my use case.
@boo_@solene Also, learning that there is no FDE makes me really paranoid about losing my phone.
All of this has culminated in me getting ready for switching back to CalyxOS, and I will probably do so in the coming days. I do feel that I have gotten some perspective, though. I think that the current state of Android phones makes it really hard to get a good experience on a traditional distro, and one would probably have to use a phone built with those in mind for the experience to be truly good. I find that there are a lot of compromises that have to be made when using a device with Halium, sadly; one of which seems to be that kernel updates seem to be really hard.