Luxury Linux Smartphones
tuxphones.com
tuxphones.com
It's good that these devices are starting to appear - it's a shame that many of them are either so niche that they can justify the markup, or likely to require a large amount of skill to perform and manage the linux install.
One day, we might meet in the middle.
[1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... [2]: https://www.fxtec.com
In today's market, I genuinely prefer a little Bluetooth keyboard with a dock for propping up a tablet or phone. If I need it, it's way better than the membrane garbage on these things, and if I don't need it, it isn't unnecessarily bulking up the phone in my pocket.
And isn't the point of Open Source that if someone distributes tweaked binaries, you can always demand the source code - do they not do that?
But this was kinda my point - I'm aware and resigned to the fact that to run linux, I will need to do a bit of work myself. I would hope that the "premium price point" products of the original post would guarantee to do the heavy lifting for me.
And if I'm honest, I'm part of the target market that likes a reason to tinker every so often. But I appreciate the heads-up.
[1]: https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Linux_for_Cosmo
But I'd also argue security features are what you need when you don't have power, because you in effect psychologically inferiorize yourself to both your threat model and your security provider, so that's why apple plays down their security narrative in their luxury brand as well. Security as a feature makes most experiences kind of lame in anything it touches, so I don't think it's a very sound basis for a luxury product.
This seems a reasonable, but broad and unsubstantiated claim.
How much of that a particular Linux distro will use depends on the distro maintainers.
And several of the mentioned issues apply just as well to Android. (attacker waiting with data exfiltration until the network is available, etc.)
Some issues are just hand-wavy, like the USB not being the good isolation barrier, citing a link that doesn't have anything about USB.
If you check out the other HN submissions from the same site, it becomes clear that the author is ignorant on most of the topics the articles whine about, and also that there's an agenda behind it. The usual anti-user-freedom agenda that supports "modern" stuff like Wayland or Android.
Also, it shows your ignorance on the whole topic that you call wayland “anti-user-freedom agenda”.. Let me guess, you also hate systemd with a passion, right?
AOSP by default is effectively more secure than any Linux distro on a laptop by default for a couple of reasons one being that on android every app runs as its own UID. On Linux that's only sometimes the case for daemons, and almost never the case for user programs.
Sandboxing does not protect you from all the binary blobs, closed source components and all the telemetries and other forms of surveillance built in.
Not to mention all the homecalling done by applications.
OTOH Android apps are a minefield, making it extremely difficult to protect user data.
Also Android itself leaks data or sends telemetries in many places.
It’s not that hard to understand. The pinephone has zero security (as well as most linux distros) - eg. you pick it up at the wrong moment and it fails to put the lock screen on, a single rouge program can do whatever it wants with user privilege only because the old user-root distinction is meaningless, since every valuable thing is stored as the given user, etc.
Android does proper sandboxing, MAC-based security, etc. The two are night and day.
The very basics of security are Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. Privacy breaching is a breach of Confidentiality.
Please spare us from the FUD and the patronizing tone.
Facebook measuring how much time you spend on a given post and building a profile of you based on that on their servers is not at all the same level of privacy concern as third parties having access to your location.
Also, linux phones give no way to defend against the former either way, and the latter is not a problem on android or ios phones.
Nonetheless, I apologize for the patronizing tone.
This might be true of Purism, but for XOR stuff, I don’t think Linux has anything to do with it except that it is there. Recall that XOR's lineage traces back to Vertu, a onetime Nokia subsidiary that used to sell $50,000 Symbian phones (and later equally overpriced and outdated Android phones) that then went through an assortment of owners and ultimately went bankrupt after a bunch of fraud [1]. To me, it seems much more likely XOR is just trying to continue the grift of selling “luxury” to sheikhs or other people with endless amounts of money, but without having to either deal with the Google licensing requirements for Android or the hassle of doing AOSP. Linux is what XOR uses because that’s what is available, but it isn’t part of the branding or the identity of the phone.
As for Purism, aside from price, I wouldn’t call a phone that doesn’t support MMS or group SMS messages and is running hardware that was obsolete in 2019 when the specs were finalized, let alone now, “luxury.” Purism is certainly going after a very specific audience of users willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money for alpha-quality hardware/software (this isn’t a slight at the difficulty of what Purism is trying to achieve, but facts are facts), not to mention waiting months/years to get their devices to begin with, but I don’t know if that is luxury as much as it is incredibly, incredibly niche. That said, Purism certainly leans hard into the Linux branding, even if it isn’t able to deliver what it is promising.
My personal favorite “luxury” Linux phone (although it was Android-based) was the Blackphone, the super expensive, “super secure” phone that turned out to not be so secure after all [2]. Or maybe the not Linux but QNX-based Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9982, which was a $2400 BlackBerry 10 phone that was identical to regular Z10 in specs, but had a better chassis and a nice leather pouch (certainly worth the 4x premium, right?) [3].
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone [3]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982...
It's easy to find expensive phones, and the design-collaboration phones like the Porsche Blackberry are certainly high-end, but I feel like it was the concierge services on the Vertu phones that really stood out as luxury. The Blackphone probably comes closest out of the rest of the market because of the suite of "secure" services, but even that was pushing it.
AFAIK it's the most performant smartphone capable of running the mainline Linux.
[1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200819005202/en/Onw...
It works when economies of scale are involved.
The Jelly 2 was fun but the screen size was just too small to type on. I don't do much typing on my phone, but when I had to, it was very painful.
The Titan Pocket is OK. It's pretty much everything it claims to be. The only problem I have with it is that I can't get my various messaging and reminder apps (K-9, Slack, Teams) to stay alive in the background, so I'm not getting any notifications from them. I had the same problem with the Jelly 2, but turning off battery optimization for those apps fixed it, that's not working on Titan.
Unihertz phones are so cheap, it's fun to play with them for awhile. Ultimately, I think I'll end up back on a medium sized (thankfully it's trendy again to downsize screens), touchscreen-only device, with a 3.5mm jack, hopefully running Linux.
I've had people recommend me Linux phones again and again in tech circles. Not only are they absurdly out of my price range (I paid $150 for my current phone, used), they are incredibly underpowered, buggy, and the software just... Isn't. There is no software for them.
A Linux phone simply cannot serve as a replacement for an Android or iPhone in the current market. They just cannot do the things most people need from their phones. They're something for Linux fans to cream themselves over and tinker with, but I'll bet you won't see any of the people who recommend these phones ever actually using them.
I've said previously, and will say again though: the Pinephone and Waydroid are still very rough. For example, I'm going to have to figure out why Waydroid, which used to be full-screen, now only takes up half the screen. So if you occasionally need an app that's Android-only, maybe you can make the Pinephone work now. But likely only if you're at least a little bit fanatical.
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Don’t get me wrong, I also have one and the once a month checking it out is a really great feeling how fast it develops. But it is no way usable as a daily driver unless you have some very very strange meaning.
Maps aren't very smooth but they worked every time I needed them. GPS positioning is not yet reliable
The battery only holds the whole day if you don't use it much, but a second battery helps.
Recent camera progress is shown here: https://www.pine64.org/2021/09/15/september-update-hurdles-a.... It's good enough for memories. If you need a better camera, consider Librem 5. Also have a look at Sxmo, if you want to see what Pinephone can do with an optimized software: https://sxmo.org.
Android is Linux enough for most use cases, and the big problem is just having root access to it and an ability to customize.
A pure linux phone would just be a pointless annoyance, at least until someone makes a phone with external thermal interface.