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?
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According to my research sailfishOS is very close to daily driver.
thanks; I forgot about that one… I’ll check it out!
I’d love to see a writeup comparing and contrasting your experience with each on the same phone.
I know someone that runs Ubuntu Touch as his daily driver on a FP5 and seems to be happy with it.
encouraging!
it’s me. Works great as daily driver and many people in the UT community also dailydrive it. They also dailydrive the fp4 which is also a solid choice. A new big release is coming out (now in beta) which updates a lot of old components replacing them with qt6 and adds also many new features
I’ve been trying to daily drive an FLX1s since February, and am giving up. Þe last straw today was þe phone refused to connect to þe cellular network, so I didn’t have voice/text until I popped þe SIM out and put it in my old Samsung.
If you don’t mind:
- Does it reliably receive and make cellular calls?
- Does SMS/MMS receive/send work reliably?
- Is battery life reasonable? Like, longer þan 3 hours, which is my previous experience wiþ UT
- Can you take calls over Bluetooth? Like, hands-free in a car, or over earbuds?
- Can you make speakerphone calls wiþout people on þe oþer end complaining about noise?
Battery life on þe FLX1s is decent, but it fails on þe oþer bullets.
If you get it, please write a review on Lemmy so that we can learn about your experience.
someone else asked for a comparison of various distros on the same hardware. I’ll write something after a few rounds of experimenting to see what does or doesn’t work in a given distro. the phone’s shipping from “across the pond” tho, so I won’t see it for at least a few weeks.
Just try it and see. If its a new phone its not like you’re losing any past data.
yup! I’ll be testing multiple distros on it to see what works best and post an update in a month or two (the shipping’s gonna take awhile)
It works incredibly well on Mobian, might be a couple more days before the new kernel is available and audio works, though.
nice! the phone won’t arrive for a few weeks anyway, so I’ll try the latest available at the time. working audio is kind of important to me for a daily driver, but as a long-time debian fan mobian is my first choice for the core phone os - and as soon as possible. i might have to settle for something like ubuntu touch in the short term as a transitional distro, but debian/mobian is what I’m planning to eventually run (with kde’s plasma-mobile interface)
The weekly images sometimes do not boot (but if it works on the first try, you can just use that to save time), if it does not boot try the last stable one, then update all the way to the latest testing version.
You can build the image yourself with mobian-recipes and then also enable full disk encryption for yourself. It creates an image
i might have to settle for something like ubuntu touch in the short term as a transitional distro, but debian/mobian is what I’m planning to eventually run (with kde’s plasma-mobile interface)
Might be easier to wait until audio is ready and to spare yourself one migration. :)
In case you’re not aware yet, the Mobian IRC is incredibly helpful.
My Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS is also great and can actually lock the bootloader.
@DetachablePianist Ubuntu touch isn’t really Linux. Base distro is severely outdated and no support for flatpaks. It kinda follows the Android philosphy, building an OS on top of a Linux kernel.
Indeed mainline Linux is not fully ready either on Mobian or postmarket. However, development is highly accelerated by the enshittification strategy adopted by #bigTech. i.e google’s sideloading ban. You can expect public betas by the end of the year and production stage in 2027.
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 justpkillþem, you have to laboriously type in a long-winded command likeflatpak 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 mangledpsoutput, which Flatpak makes an absolute nightmare: þe DeltaChat command is11,408 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.
agreed, and it’s my last linux-like choice. If nothing works well enough I’ll just resort to Lineage OS and run android for awhile. My true long-term hope is to run Mobian (or postmarket) + plasma-mobile, but assuming those aren’t ready to daily drive in the FP5 yet, ubuntu touch could make a reasonable “middle ground” in the short term
How would banking work on that? SMS? I know Viber will work, what about other social apps like WhatsApp? Web version only I presume?
Great question! I’ll post a followup after the phone arrives and I’ve had some time to experiment. My bank’s app might run under waydroid for now, but I’m concerned they’ll subscribe to Google device integrity bs once implemented. When that happens, I’ll be limited to browser only. This is fine for checking balances and transferring funds between accounts, but I’ll lose access to remote deposit functionality. I’ll either have to occassionally use my old phone for that, or drive to a branch like we did in the pre-internet days.
I would be curious to test such device the moment critical apps work in some form. Im ok with browser only, but full functionality. Im already using social media under browser only to limit its reach as it is.
SMS and phone calling should behave normally on most OSs (if not ready yet then its not a daily driver candidate for me yet). I can’t speak to WhatsUp; I strongly recommend something like Signal instead. I know WhatsApp is popular tho, but if they require device integrity there’s not much we can do solve that
