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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I have thought about buying one of the Pinephone things, because I want to actually own the computer in my pocket, but I have always hesitated because the hardware is always kind of ancient for these things. The Pinephone doesn’t even have 5G, so I am not even sure that my phone service will let me activate it now.

What I would like is to take my existing iPhone 13 Pro and install a real Linux on it so I could guarantee decent hardware. You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.

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> You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.

I don't remember all the details but I had a Mac G3 around the same time I started using Linux: I don't remember the story about installing Linux no Mac hardware as being a particularly easy one.

Now I'm not saying that years after the fact, Linux wouldn't run fine on Intel Macs. But if I recall correctly it always has been a bit of a bumpy road.

I didn't have a Mac in that era, but I did have a Macbook Air from 2014 and I ran Ubuntu and NixOS on it just fine, even at the time. I had to use rEFInd but it wasn't terribly hard.

On modern Macs, it's pretty easy to install Linux with Avahi.

To be clear, I don't necessarily need it to be easy to put another OS on there. I just want it to be possible. As far as I'm aware, there's no way (officially or unofficially) to install another OS on any recent iPhones. Someone might eventually figure out how to break the bootloader on the iPhone 13, but I personally think it should be something that the owner of the phone is allowed to opt into.

5G is probably not a requirement for your phone service (although I can’t say for sure). The critical bit on networks in the U.S. and many other countries without 2G or 3G is VoLTE for phone calls and texts, which it does support. Some carriers have device whitelists that are only loosely related to technical features, though.

Even still, it's 2026, I don't really think "has 5G" is considered a luxury feature on a smartphone.

I'm sure that the Pine folks have very good reasons for not having 5G support, but those reasons don't really matter to the end user.

I'm running SailfishOs on Gigasets assembled in Germany and they have G5. It's a port and I don't have android support at all. I maintain a number if apps and it feels like ownership. Also have a spare Jolla with droid stuff, but use that max once a week.

Librem 5 has an experimental support of a 5G modem: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem5-5g-is-here-modem-sim8202g-t...

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