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Comment by mpol | Hacker News Reader

Anyone using PostmarketOS on a phone? And I mean as a daily driver, with no other phone. I have been following it for years and would like to switch someday, but that moment hasn't happened yet.

Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.

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I do use a Pinephone (not pro) for 5y now. I switched to the "stable" branch of pmos 2y ago which made my life siginicantly more hassle free. Note that pmos support for pinephone (not pro) degraded in recent stable release, so i recommend to not run 24.12 but the prior version. you will still get occasional updates from the stable alpine branch it's based on (which makes 99% of available packages anyway).

VoLTE works fine (phosh with gnome-calls)

feel free to ask questions you may have

Thank you.

Do you use Waydroid and Android apps? Apps like Whatsapp and Signal are things I use.

Here is one recent report after using PinePhone with PostmarketOS and Phosh for a few years:

Daily Driving a Linux Phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750756 - 2 days ago (3 points, 2 comments)

I used mobian for a few months, but I normally have 2 sim cards, and battery life was really short.

Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.

The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.

I do, a Oneplus 6, PMOS "edge" with OpenRC + Phosh. Everything is fine, except I still need to reboot the phone after each call to be sure to have the audio working

How is 4G calling (VoLTE) these days? Last I heard it needed quite a bit of a manual work to get it going.

Sailfish(OS) supports VoLTE in newer, supported devices. For community ports and other mobile Linux distros it's afaik still rare. Closed drivers and obtaining configurations for carriers in other countries are the 2 big showstoppers.

I maintain the PinePhone for pmOS. It's my only phone and I've been using it without major problems (not including temporary regressions) since 2021. I use it for calls, SMS, camera, firefox and a couple of Android applications in Waydroid (Element X, Doordash).

Can't speak for the other user who says "degraded in recent stable release"; I use edge and I'm not aware of any issues, and latest stable is as stable as edge is.

Edit: Actually, one "degraded" in the last few months is that GTK dropped support for hardware acceleration on the PP's ancient GPU (2008, GLES 2 only, gtk requires 3 now) so GNOME-related DEs like Phosh use the CPU for rendering now. It's still snappy enough for the way I use it but it might be slow for videos and such.

I now use PostmarketOS as a daily driver on the old standard Pinephone, and it looks good to me. After trying a few recent distributions PostmarketOS seemed to work best.

Before PostmarketOS I used Arch on a Pinephone Pro for 2 years, but I think it finally updated itself into oblivion... The software never reached a really stable state, but I was surprised, that it worked so long.

In the beginning of the PinePhone I think Mobian worked best, but the most recent version didn't look as good as PostmarketOS to me.

I'm daily driving the latest stable (24.12 now) on a Librem 5 with no major issues. VoLTE calls and SMS work fine although I couldn't care less as there isn't much reason to use unencrypted legacy comms in 2025 when we have Signal, Matrix, Delta Chat, XMPP, etc.

I have a OnePlus 6 becoming "free" soon and I will definitely give PostmarketOS a shot (I had a glance at their compatibility list and noticed the OP6 is on there). Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

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