I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)
My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.
I am the administrator of the system on my phone. It's the same OS as what I've been using on my PCs for decades, so it's very familiar. It's fully scriptable in whatever language I wish to use, so I can easily adjust its behavior. I can use sandboxes when I need them and ignore them when I don't. Its software components are replaceable and patchable - if something bothers me, I can write a patch, compile a patched package, install it and even send a merge request upstream right on the phone itself without using any other device - regardless of whether it's about desktop environment behavior, cellular middleware or a kernel driver. I can freely modify the system to my liking without being punished for it. I never have to wrestle with the system whenever I want to keep something running in the background.
It just feels like my little personal computer. No Android device ever felt this way to me. I don't want to feel like a guest confined to a sandbox within a computing device I'm supposed to own.
If you have selinux then you may not be "absolute God either", and arguably it's never necessary to have that much control. I would much prefer to have sane security boundaries so something blowing up won't bring everything down with it.
And there are quite a few devices with unlockable bootloaders so you can feel to hack whatever you want with AOSPs.
I had to build a patched Android image in the past, so no thanks, it's definitely not something I would want to do in my spare time just to tinker. It's a system that's designed to be user-hostile; you can fight it if you want, but why would I do that if I can just keep using GNU/Linux instead?
I'm pretty sure both Librem 5 and PinePhone can use VoLTE in the US. The former you can even buy together with a MVNO service that's just guaranteed to work.
I forgot about the Librem. I originally used the PinePhone 5 years ago and had to switch to a OP6 because the PinePhone was unbearably slow. It looks like Mobian and PostmarketOS both support VoLTE on the PinePhone now which is good.
BTW, isn't VoLTE on devices like OP6 pretty much a solved thing by now as well? These devices with no discrete modem had to configure all the IMS services manually over undocumented QMI interfaces (as opposed to a documented AT command than then makes the discrete modem do the same thing internally), but I believe that has been figured out some time ago already.
When I ran the OP6 5 years ago on PostmarketOS it wasn't working. I had a PR open with the devs and we tried to figure it out but lost steam. It looks like someone on Reddit got it working two years ago:
So yeah, 5 years ago it wasn't so critical to have it yet, and by the time it became critical it also became supported. Perhaps that's why you keep reading articles that don't mention it :)
Agreed. I assume aftermarket Linux support for Android devices with out-of-the-box unlockable bootloaders (including the OP6/6T) is the most likely path to viable daily-driver "Linux phones" in the future, and it's strange how the linked article doesn't seem to mention this at all.
Yes, I probably should have addressed that in my article, but my primary focus was on whether Linux phones can grow from being a miniscule niche for nerds like me to being a real alternative for normal people to Android and iOS phones. I would guesstimate that around 10,000 Linux phones were sold in 2025, which represented 0.0008% of the global smartphone market that year. The question I was asking is whether we can get to 0.1% or even 1% of the market. Rereading the article, I see that I wasn't very good about explaining the focus of the article. There was so much technical stuff to cover, and I got a little lost in all that.
If you look through the list of recommended devices for Nura (formerly postmarketOS), the only one that has full software support for all the hardware is the Librem 5, and the second best supported phone is the PinePhone.
The rest of the phones are dated Android devices which all have significant functions that don't work correctly. The processor with the best support is the Snapdragon 845 from 2018 in the OnePlus 6/6T, POCO F1 and SHIFT6mq, and all of those devices have issues that a geek like me can accept (like downloading code from github and manually compiling to get a partially functional camera), but it isn’t really an option for ordinary people.
I think that it is very important that there are native Linux phone manufacturers, totally independent on Google, and thus also independent on Android and Android Open Source Project (AOSP), or Android kernels in any way.
A cash flow is essential to sustain a Linux mobile ecosystem. And in the Linux world the sell goes often once. Just when selling the device itself. But software has to be maintained, and people have to be paid. Therefore, I highly recommend to buy a native Linux hardware device, independent on Android, if you want to support mobile Linux, and have the financial means.
There are options to donate to different mobile Linux projects as well though. Only a small donation can already make a difference, especially if many people are providing such support.
It is hopeful to see how different Linux phone software projects, and Linux phone competitors in a way are all working together to further a truly free operating system. The phone market is large enough for native Linux phones to exist next to each other. So not Linux as an aftermarket, but Linux native phones that support the whole mobile Linux world. And yes, also there is place for aftermarket Linux support, but I doubt if this would be enough in the long run.
> If what you care about is protecting device and application providers' interests from their users, then I guess it does.
That clearly isn't what they care about, or intended with their comment. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
I wonder whether Android/iOS will ever become a viable alternative to GNU/Linux phones. They failed to make me switch for nearly two decades now and only seem to be getting worse.
I can't speak from personal experience, but nearly everyone else in this thread is arguing the opposite: Linux phones are slower and buggier than Android.
What metrics/specific reasons drive your contrary POV?
My personal experience. I've been using GNU/Linux on my daily driver phones for nearly two decades now. Started just before the first Android phone appeared on the market and went through a bunch of devices since. Android never appeared to me as a viable alternative during that whole time (it was in fact closer to being one in the past than it is now) and iOS has just never been something I'd like to use.
I have listed several reasons why I think so in other threads here already, but the main thing is that what I longed for in 2008 when I was getting my first smartphone was a connected personal computer that I can put into my pocket and carry around through a day, and that's what I was always getting with GNU/Linux phones, so I never really got used to the idea of smartphones as these limited, mostly vendor-controlled devices that effectively serve as a trusted runtime environment for adversarial software (and by "trusted" I mean trusted by apps, of course). Instead, I see my phone like I always saw my GNU/Linux PCs - as a tiny box full of useful tools that are there to serve and empower me to reach my goals and which I can put together and modify any way I like to. May not have the sleekest design out there, may not be a speed demon, may have a quirk or two to tolerate and may require me to scratch some itches by myself, but it does what I tell it to regardless of whether it's aligned with some corporation's interests or not and it's well worth the effort spent to configure it to my liking. It's also generally a wonderful thing to tinker with (though this mattered much more when I was still a teenager :))
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