Interested in hearing everyone’s experience using alternative phone OS’s. Have you ever used Lineage or Graphene, Pursim, pinephone? Was it good enough to replace your android/iphone?
I run Arch on a PinePhone Pro. It’s been working really well. Recent updates have improved it a lot. The phone now wakes itself up from sleep when it receives a call or SMS, calls and SMS have been very reliable, MMS messages now work, etc. I even have Android apps running on my PinePhone Pro using Waydroid, which is now hardware accelerated. I use it as a daily driver and it’s a very good daily driver.
The only major issue is that the drivers for the cameras haven’t been mainlined yet which means that even if you get a kernel that supports them, most camera apps won’t support them and the ones that do don’t have postprocessing yet, so the white balance is off and the quality is horrible. If you don’t need the cameras though, it works really well.
Here’s a screenshot of Waydroid running on my PinePhone Pro. I’m using an Android image with microG. The black bars on the top and bottom are part of Phosh, the desktop environment I’m using, then everything in the middle is Android running inside a Waydroid container.
I am using Lineage but not really sure if it qualifies, it is still an android. Overall, it is pretty good. The main issues I am getting is due to the fact that I didn’t install version with Google services, and I am using MicroG instead (open source implementation). Some applications don’t like it, and you have to do some trickery with rooting to have a chance to run them (for example our national identification application), but it is pretty rare.
I would recommend it if you want to still be able to use everything you need but want a bit more FOSS experience.
use the Aurora store if you need google play apps.
It creates a fake google user, lets you download the app with that fake user, then you can download that app from the google store. It looks like you download it from aurora from the front end though. I heard it doesn’t work for all apps, but I’ve yet to have issues with it.
I do, what I meant was that some applications complain due to the Google’s Safety Net feature. For example, if I open my national ID app, it will say something like this device cannot be trusted unless I do things with Magisk.
But yeah overall I always try to download everything from F-droid if I can, it is shame that even some FOSS applications don’t distribute their software there.
I used an experimental version of Ubuntu touch on a pine phone roughly three years ago. It was slow due to the limited hardware of what was essentially a development device, but besides the occasional dropped call it worked well (if a bit unstable). It has been a few years however, so I imagine the situation he improved sense then. It was good enough to replace my Android phone, that is, a device used for text, call, email, podcasts, and locally downloaded video.
I tried Ubuntu Touch and really liked the interface, but it used a really old version of Ubuntu that I really didn’t want to deal with so now I use Phosh on Arch.
They just recently re-based it to a newer version of Ubuntu under the hood.
Yeah, I saw that, but I’d prefer a rolling release. I might try it though and see how much I like it. Maybe I can get the DE running on Arch with some work.
That would be interesting. I’ve personally always preferred more standard release structures.
You are the first person I know to have used Ubuntu Touch lol
HarmonyOS I love the new Huawei OS and love that they made an open source version, OpenHarmony, me and my friend screw around with it on an old recycled google home with the big touch screen. But yeah, I love HarmonyOS, way prefer it to android os
it looks cool but is it closed source?
Nah. It’s Huawei, though OpenHarmony is an open sourced version of it, it’s not identical.
Calyx os works well for me. I’m going to try out Graphene os. The Librum 5 with stock OS is kind of dissappointing and heats up too much. I will try to install postmarket on the librum 5 and see if it doesn’t heat up too much.
GrapheneOS is something you want to stay away from. Recently they screamed hoax about a CP spammer in their chats from CalyxOS community, and how he got a swatting attempt from them. He has presented no evidence of it, it has been a week now.
This developer has issues and has lied a dozen of times at this point about various things in the past years.
https://reddit.com/r/u_lo________________ol/comments/1314x2x/why_did_i_do_this/
I am a mod of c/privacy at main Lemmy instance, and his group chat mods did this against me last year, similarly threatening with Canadian police stuff. https://archive.ph/acy2h Also forgot to mention how they hijacked the Lemmy c/privacy Matrix room, banned me off and repurposed it for Lemmy.ca instance. Admins did not help me against that Yayannick traitor and those GrapheneOS minions.
Also, he and his acolytes have called Bromite and FlorisBoard developers very colourful epithets.
The Bromite drama stems from a CalyxOS developer submitting a PR for Bromite. Since Daniel hates CalyxOS with a passion, it gets pretty messy. Pop some popcorn, then see these links:
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/pull/2102#issuecomment-1155760155
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141
The Florisboard drama was caused by the Florisboard developer backing out of their partnership due to Daniel’s weird behavior when it came to Bromite:
http://web.archive.org/web/20220803142758/https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/issues/1921
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I use just ZTE since 2015 and 2016
what’s the OS?
No idea, I have to check it
I run Graphenee and it is an awesome user experience - most of the conveniences of stock android with the peace of mind of privacy and security
graphene and lineage seem to be the most popular. Anything about it that doesn’t work, or missing functionality compared to android?
With graphene’s sandboxed play services, mostly no - if you need to use play store apps, it has the ability to install google play services in isolation with a compatibility layer on top that allows you to restrict google’s access to everything while letting you use play store apps as normal, granted you may need to sign in with a google account for functionality like paid apps. Everything for me has worked well so far app wise.
The one thing that has been not exceptional is location services. At the moment, graphene uses gps/glonass for location while stock android uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, WiFi and Bluetooth scanning which it sends to google servers to get precise location. This means graphene’s location is much worse/unusable indoors and isn’t quite as precise outdoors, so while google’s location services are invasive they are also quite useful. You can configure it to use google location services but I find this counter productive, and the website says that they are working on bringing more precise location services locally.
I’ve used lineage in the past with MicroG and was both excited to try to degoogle but also realized how much I relied on play services. MicroG is a package of apps that mimic play services but I found it to only sometimes work. Notifications were broken on apps that rely on play services until I realized I needed to sign in with google, but signing in with google ended up causing multiple problems. When you need to sign on to gmail on a new device it will automatically try to use your android device as a two factor sign on. Because I hadn’t yet set up a two factor authenticator app and MicroG doesn’t implement this feature, I was locked out of my gmail account for a few days. Additionally apps that wanted you to sign in with your google account did not work. This was all frustrating enough that I ended up switching to lineage with google apps, which worked but kind of felt like it defeated the purpose.
Just to round it out, a few nice to have features of android won’t work out of the box like “what’s playing”. Android auto nor google pay will work either. I’ve never really used these features but others will definitely notice them being gone. At the same time there are so many awesome things to discover while having graphene or lineage like all of the privacy respecting apps on F-Droid, and I feel way less about my phone sharing everything I do to google
thanks for the detailed response.
having precise location is kind of important, but obviously how google goes about being that precise is problematic…
what device are you currently using graphene on?
No problem!
I got a pixel 6a (you need a pixel for graphene) and it comes with 5 years of hardware support from google which means it will be fully supported by graphene for at least 5 years. All pixels from 6 on come with 5 years while earlier ones only had 3 years
oh cool, thx
btw how’s the battery life
Plenty good for me - over a full day with my use. The pixel 6a had bad battery problems when it dropped but most of those have been patched and ported to graphene
I have a pinephone pro and an og pinephone. Neither have met my needs to replace my android phone(pixel 6).
Im hopeful in the next few years the ecosystem will mature, and it will be a viable platform.
yeah that’s my concern; that other phones don’t have the same usability as android or iphone
I use a 20+ y.o. Nokia I bought for 20Eu and works/looks like new I have no idea what the OS for nokia was back then, you know the one with a 9icon square menu :)
I have had an encyclopedic interest on pinephone … but I can’t yet justify the cost of one. I have 2-3 older Nokias still very functional but heavier as backups incase some decade this one refuses to boot again.
Nokia ran Windows Phone OS. It flopped because no one used it because there were no apps so no one made apps because no one used it.
you use that as your daily driver? what is the experience like?
