Hey all,
I want to get away from Android, at the moment my solution is a flip phone. it runs an old version of Android GO, but the lack of practicality drives me away from using it frequently.
are there any good phone/distro combos with working VoLTE? anything to avoid? any advice or recs would be great.
Thanks!
Motorola have announced a partnership with Graphene OS, a Canadian company. If the models Moto ships are semi affordable I would jump at that.
Are their phones even any good? Serious question, I haven’t heard of Motorola in the last 10 or so years, I didn’t even know they still existed.
It would be deliciously ironic if they launched GrapheneOS on their Thinkphone models though. They would totally match my thinkpad laptop which I already use.
Motorola have always done great low and mid range phones. They were a hold out on removable batteries longer than any other company for example. Don’t know if they still do such phones though but I do know there still good in that race comparatively. Good value for money.
Graphene is not a GNU/Linux distro, it’s an Android fork.
Perhaps not, but there is no GNU/Linux distro that is “ready for primetime” as a mobile OS right now. I WISH there was, but UBPorts, PostmarketOS, etc all either have significant features disparity or are straight up still marketed as “developer experimental”.
GrapheneOS is a solid choice for now to provide an alternative, whether a permanent replacement or a stepping stone.
Jolla has sailfish OS as the official ROM and it has for quite a few years now (for all their past phones). It’s not marketed as a dev experimental.
A lot of people who are eager to install Linux on their phones this early are out off by the proprietary parts of SailfishOS. I personally want a Linux phone in large part due to distrust of proprietary software for a device with such capacity to invade my privacy.
Proprietary blobs are also present throughout regular linux distributions. And I hear and participate with the moans they generate but users understand that sometimes modems, wireless chips or GPUs (main culprits) have us stuck at the onset of using Linux at all. Debian had to reverse it’s procedure from a default free only to default mix and user has to specify if he doesn’t want proprietary firmware installed. Even graphene OS has to make do with proprietary firmware.
FuriOS’s FLX1s works pretty well; it’s been my primary device for 3 months, now.
Never even heard of that device before. Can you get Signal messenger on it?
So there’s Flare which works (GTK implementation) but it’s far from feature parity; but it definitely works pretty nicely, for what it is.
The device also has really good Android emulation; certain Google Play services still don’t quite work, even though it comes with MicroG preinstalled (e.g. the Integrity API so, unfortunately, all my banking app.s crash themselves), but I can’t imagine Signal uses any that’d cause it not to run.
I have it (the Android version) installed and it opens just fine but I haven’t had the chance to try transferring the account (and all messages) over, yet. So I’d expect it’d fully work but that’s all I can tell you, yet.
I can come back and let you know how it goes and how well it works – once I get there –, if you’d like.
I’d appreciate that! Signal messenger support is honestly the biggest thing I can’t live without if I’m going to convert away. I’ve been considering a move to GrapheneOS soon without any Google Play Services and just using Aurora/F-Droid, but I’d REALLY love to move to a full Linux phone that isn’t Android-based, as I view GrapheneOS as just a stepping stone still beholden to Google’s whims.