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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to use Android. I've been using various GNU/Linux phones for the last 17 years, so being able to do `gcc -o main main.cpp && ./main` on a phone is just natural to me. Back in 2008, as a teenager, I could choose to spent my first earned money to get me either one of the first GNU/Linux phones on the market or the first Android phone, and I feel that as the time goes it only validates my decision.

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What is your feedback in regards to battery? Android have been exhausted in development to optimize battery usage but I'm reading linux phones don't really care that much so you end up with a dead phone in less of a day.

Has a power user, what has your experience been on that topic?

I'd switch my phone to linux on a heartbeat because android apps seem compatible enough nowadays to run there too but battery is always the pressing limitation.

My thanks in advance.

I'm using a Librem 5 and its battery life is good enough for me - it lasts pretty much exactly what's needed for me to get through a typical day, so I often get home with the battery almost but not entirely flat. When I know that I'm going to be using it more intensively or need it to last longer, I'll usually just put a spare battery into my backpack, but I rarely actually need to use it when these days you can just charge up in a train or tram.

That's not a universal property of these devices though - N900 that I used previously could easily last a few days.

Having a spare battery or being able to change battery seems like a fever dream for people on new android devices.

I am seriously interested in linux phones... like I am interested in either getting a grapheneos phone or somehow looking through my old garage of parents phones to see if any phone can be linux'd

I don't want to spend money right away but I am also a teenager, but the thing that's kinda stopping me from spending is that terminal can already be done through things like termux and the question I am asking myself is: is it good enough I have written back to back comments about it on why I think running android on linux using waydroid seems more performant than vice versa but I am curious.

Are there any recommendations that you have for me? I want to get linux on my phone but I am pretty sure that there are no second hand linux phones and I think it might cost me a lot of money (well for my country) anyway and I feel like the issue for me not being able to tinker is monetary of sorts.

The PinePhone is a cheaper phone supported by mobile Linux distros like postmarketOS, maybe look at that. The CPU is not as fast as the Librem though. postmarketOS has some support for a range of devices though, maybe one of them is cheaper used than the PinePhone for you.

https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/ https://postmarketos.org/

The PinePhone also has the advantage that the proprietary Linux distro running on the ARM processor within the modem can be replaced with a fully open source distro. I think the Hexagon processor in the modem can't be replaced yet.

https://themodemdistro.com/ https://github.com/the-modem-distro/

See also the Debian Mobile wiki page, which is fairly unmaintained these days.

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile

> terminal can already be done through things like termux

For me, the terminal itself isn't really the value proposition, it's just one of the consequences. What actually matters it that I get to be the real administrator of that device. I can grab any package - whether an application, library, shell or system daemon - and hack on it and patch it however I want, the exact same way I can do it on my laptop's OS. I can replace entire components. I can write scripts that interact with any part of the OS or the hardware. Back when I was a teenager myself, I used to code my own replacement for messaging UI (among other things) in Python, on the phone itself - it really kickstarted my programming skills. These things are just not possible with Android, where patching stuff up is a PITA even when you do it on a PC. Android development follows a completely different philosophy which I don't really subscribe to.

> I feel like the issue for me not being able to tinker is monetary of sorts

Yeah, unfortunately the best option is quite pricey. Viable alternatives may include PinePhone and OnePlus 6, though note that the former is noticeably lower-end and the latter isn't as well supported. However, either of them may end up being enough if you're motivated to tinker.

> seems like a fever dream

What if I told you that when you have a USB power source around for a moment, you can even hot-swap the battery without turning the phone off? :D

I've been looking at Linux phones for a while, and now the latest 'sideloading' lockdown from Google has pushed me to seriously consider getting off Android. What phones do you use or recommend for someone who has a little Linux experience?

Smartphone Linux is a total mess. Even postmarketOS does not have a single fully supported and maintained device it can point to and say "buy this, you can run fully featured Linux on it". Very sad. The best option seems to be running Termux on GrapheneOS on the latest Pixels.

Maybe start with GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel phone, its a privacy/security focused Android fork.

Otherwise for full Linux, take a look at shipping-with-Android devices that are semi-supported by postmarketOS, Mobian etc. Or go with vendors focused on non-Android Linux like Pine64 PinePhone, Purism Librem, Furilabs, Liberux and maybe some I forgot. The Debian Mobile wiki page has a whole lot of other links but I stopped maintaining it.

https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://furilabs.com/ https://liberux.net/ https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile

May I add this link to your interesting list : https://volla.online/en/

Volla OS looks like an Android fork, so more like GrapheneOS than postmarketOS/etc.

When buying the phone you can choose to have it with Ubuntu Touch instead of Volla OS. There is also multi-boot.

Ubuntu Touch is still an Android-based OS (they used to have a variant that didn't rely on Android, but discontinued it).

Thanks for that precision, I didn't know about that fact. For those interested : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/ContainerArchitecture

The only stopper for most of us fully moving to Linux phones are banking apps...

I am interested to hear how you deal with that as a full linux phone user

Attestation stuff means you probably can't run them even on non-Google versions of Android, so probably get a cheapo second phone for the banking apps.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

I have barely any reason to use a banking app when almost everything on my account can be done via Web, but when I do want to use BLIK I run the app in Waydroid.

The problem is most bank here for you to log in the Web, you need to install the bank mobile app so you can fetch the security key required to authenticate.

Fortunately this hasn't been an issue for me. Sounds like you should ask your bank what a person with no Android or iOS device should do to access their services then. If that doesn't help it may be worth contacting a parliamentary representative.

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