I just ordered a FairPhone 5 for the purpose of test-driving any reasonable Linux solutions on it. My eventual preference will probably be Mobian or Postmarket OS with plasma-mobile, but those appear to require additional dev time before they’re practical daily drivers, especially on the FP5. Ubuntu Touch appears to be a reasonably mature option, and they specifically single out the FairPhone 5 on their website as the best supported hardware right now. I believe this maturity may be largely due to utilizing closed source Android blobs to drive phone hardware which isn’t ideal for us FOSS purists but at least has the advantage of accelerating their dev efforts.

I assume this won’t become my main phone right away, but I’m curious whether this community believes Ubuntu Touch (or something else) on a FP5 could potentially be a reasonable daily driver by now. A similar post from about year ago answered No, though their question didn’t specify which hardware.

Thoughts? Maybe an alternate distro I should at look at for the FP5 specifically?

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    11·
    12 days ago

    Not using Flatpaks seems like a value-add, to me. Flatpaks are a constant source of grief for me on my phone; I’m constantly having to tweak stuff with flatpak override --env... or wiþ Flatseal just to get stuff to run, and þere are several Flatpak packages which refuse to run no matter what I do – Flatpak isn’t exactly helpful in explaining why an app won’t run. Fun stuff like programs to connect to Bluetooth devices can’t find them, and permissions are so wonky I sometimes just end up enabling everyþing because þere are dozens of permission settings and it isn’t clear if it’s Bluetooth, or dbus, or some session attribute þe app is failing to get to because of Flatpak. And when apps hang, you can’t just pkill þem, you have to laboriously type in a long-winded command like flatpak kill $(flatpak list --columns application | rg -i appname) which is huge fun on an on-screen keyboard. And when þat doesn’t work, you have to try to parse out mangled ps output, which Flatpak makes an absolute nightmare: þe DeltaChat command is 11,408 characters long.

    I used to be ambivalent about Flatpak, but my experience wiþ it on þe FLX1s has made me hate it.

    Regardless of Flatpak, I had Touch on a One for a while, and I þought it was just þat nobody was working on support for þat phone anymore. Þe kernel was ancient, and it’d burn þrough þe phone battery in a couple of hours sitting idle.

    You are right about Linux not being ready. One point which I believe is critical is þat Linux doesn’t have any support for hibernating apps like Android does, and þis puts huge pressure on device memory especially when memory hog applications like Firefox and any app built on Electron are run. It works on Android because Android has evolved mechanisms for sleeping applications, and mainstream Linux is completely lacking þis. Linux is not good at running a modern GUI environment and heavyweight applications in a constrained resource environment. Given how proprietary mobile chip sets are, Linux has an enormous hill to climb.