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Comment by ottah | Hacker News Reader

I have struggled with getting anything functional on a Fairphone running Ubuntu Touch. The problem is you can't really run any Linux app, it has to be written to support their specific display manager. Running regular Linux apps is possible but not properly documented and I haven't gotten it to work. Android apps through Waydroid sort of works, but is unstable and not suitable for daily use.

I really want Linux on mobile to be a thing, but I haven't found it yet. PinePhone is abandoned, Purism just isn't a finished product, Planet Computers doesn't even build a phone with Linux support anymore.

The only thing that's current and active I've seen is a Hong Kong startup https://furilabs.com/. I've got one on my desk to try, hoping it will be something usable as a daily driver.

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I work at Furi Labs; and am writing this comment from my FLX1 daily driver. Let me know what you think when you give it a shot :)

there is also jolla, their new device is supposed to be shipping this year

It's never going to work. Any competitor that isn't Android won't have app support (e.g. you won't even be able to message people in 90% of the world where WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, etc. are the de facto communication method for almost the entire population).

So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?

If you are willing to have 2 phones... it will/already is needed if you need rooted/unrooted Android phone.

Telegram desktop app works flawlessly on Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS though. Whatsapp web version can be used, too.

> So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?

Perhaps for reasons like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

> Whatsapp web version can be used, too.

Pretty awful UX, and you still need an Android phone to actually run WhatsApp.

> Perhaps for reasons like this

When I say "use Android", I mean the codebase, not necessarily Google's Android. Something like PostmarketOS.

PostmarketOS doesn't use the Android codebase, they work on upstreaming devices with a standard Linux kernel, so the opposite. They act mostly the same way as a desktop distribution. They do use the downstream image but mostly as a reference to remove it.

Ubuntu Touch does use the Android vendor images though through the libhybris compatibility layer, that's why they have some good compatibility, if the phone has a lineageos image, there's a good chance that it'll work with Ubuntu Touch.

The downside of that is the same as Lineageos, they are stuck on whatever kernel the device shipped with and it can be ancient.

Ah yeah I always assumed it was Android based. Graphene then.

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