Thank you very much! but please save the praise for when i get working calls.
~~after that praise me as much as you like xd~~
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Linux Phones
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The Discussion on Linux-based Phones.
Benefits:
- Hardware freedom.
- Perfect operating-system competition.
- Full utilization of specs.
- Phone lifespan raises to 10+ years.
- Less e-waste.
Linux Mobile Distros:
- Sailfish🇫🇮
- FuriOS🇺🇸
- Ubuntu Touch🇩🇪
- Postmarket OS🇨🇭
- Mobian
- Pure OS🇺🇸
- Plasma Mobile🇩🇪
- LuneOS
- openSUSE Mobile🇩🇪
- Nemomobile
- Droidian
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- ExpidusOS
- Maemo Leste
- Manjaro Arm
- Tizen
- WebOS
Linux Mobile Hardware:
- Jolla Phone🇫🇮
- Shift Phone🇩🇪
- FLX1🇺🇸
- Fairphone 5🇳🇱
- Volla Phone🇩🇪
- Librem 5🇺🇸
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As people may have noticed from my lack of posts, this is sadly quite the hard problem compared to my previous bringups.
I do say that giving up is not part of my dictionary but im genuinly running out of ideas here.
If people have been following along with the LKML this is very relevant:
From Codec pov, its exactly same IP, I have now SDCA drivers working for both playback and capture, so Am hoping that we could use the same SDCA driver for both of these modes. I still have to give it a try on a mobile platform to verify this.
Am hoping to send a version of this driver sometime this week.
--srini
This is a response of Srinivas on my mic patch, if their SDCA complaint driver does work on the FP6, then my driver gets superseded, and maybe i can make my calls work on their SDCA driver, we'll see.
Honestly it is crazy that some parts like Audioreach calls and NFC-CE are just completely uncharted territory on linux if and i repeat if i get this working i would genuinely be the first.
I'm also keeping my eyes peeled for this one https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260713121816.2728888-1-ravi.hothi@oss.qualcomm.com, its an FP6 adjacent board and they can actually read the hashed DIAG messages from the modem and get the plaintext (qualcomm really making it hard for me)
Getting the DIAG channel open was quite a bit of work, and then it was finally open and i hoped for a breaktrough like with GPS and then its all obsfucated...
Breaking news: after days of smashing my head into a vocoder shaped wall im now going to try to do it fully in userspace instead of the qualcomm kernel path.
I got quite close with this, but no matter what i did it wasn't coming online.
The issue with this hardware is that it's not going trough the linux audio system really, its IMO quite janky with graphs going straight to the amps.
My new approach should make the modem just a regular pipewire source/sink, we shall see in the coming days if this new approach works.
It's not entirely unprecedented, OpenIMSs is doing something similar.
having it as a regular linux audio device is also so much better, that way it's nice and integrated and there is no separate route that gives trouble.
this should also address erebion's question for bluetooth calls, as we can then just use the regular bluetooth audio which already works
Speaking of Bluetooth, if you manage to figure out this one, it is probably the biggest blocker for me I've had from being able to fully move to Linux + LineageOS via Waydroid: the ability to share Bluetooth with both the Linux host and Waydroid simultaneously like you can with many other IO. Not sure if NFC has this same issue.
Is there any way to support you outside of attempting this in parallel for ideas/breakthroughs?
If I get this working the best way to support would be to test it with different carriers. I can only test it with my own. And that doesn't guarantee it will work for everyone.
we will, we will.
I'd be really glad if Bluetooth calls could be made to work. As far as I'm aware, that'd not supported on mainline for any device.
Out of alö the things, that is what I miss the most.
Time to switch back to Ice Cream Sandwich I guess!
I want Google to collapse and fail like... yesterday.
Hang on, as a Fairphone user, what's PMOS in this context? I've been running e/OS because I got mine through Murena, but I've been in the market for even more de-Googled alternatives, since e/OS appears to be sort of the kiddy pool.
you can swim in the kiddy pool, you ll drown in the 3 meter linux port pool
PMOS is PostmarketOS, it is a linux distribution for mobile devices.
e/OS is a fork of LineageOS bundled with MicroG.
the difference is that PostmarketOS runs mainline linux, while e/OS and LineageOS still run android.
while degoogled, android is in the end still controlled by google, and their game plan seems to be to shift as much from AOSP to google play services, which will make degoogled android harder and harder.
using mainline linux bypasses this entirely. with the bonus of being able to use all software of the linux ecosystem.
Now I really want to upgrade my fairphone 4. It's been close to 5 years with it and the battery is dying. I'll see if I can buy a replacement battery and run PMOS on it, and have the FP5 as backup.
All the software of the Linux ecosystem with extremely poor mobile device compatibility design wise.
There's actually quite a few bits that are compatible! I tried out the OnePlus 6 with Phosh, and there are lots of good apps already! Make sure to look for apps that are labeled "adaptive" in the software store, those work the best on mobile. Firefox also works quite well with the "Add Water" app, it gives it a GTK theme (matches with Phosh) and increases padding by a bit.
As for the apps I liked (all of which adapted well in mobile): Geary (email client, GTK3 I think, so you need to enable dark mode in the mobile settings), Fractal (Matrix client), Gapless (music player), GNOME/KDE Weather, Secrets (KeePass client), Apostrophe (Markdown notes), Mimick (Immich sync client), Fotema (photo gallery), Animatch (match game with cute art and no microtransactions or ads, open-source too!), Ultimate Tic Tac Toe (actually has quite a bit of strategy involved), Pentobi (very similar to the "Blokus" board game if you've ever played that, very fun!)
And there are a lot of KDE/Qt equivalents that I have not tried (since I was running the GTK-based Phosh)
Being able to install Flathub apps was very handy actually, and it's one of the reasons why I decided to try postmarketOS over something like Ubuntu Touch.
If you want to explore other mobile apps (on Flathub): https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/mobile/1
how does one get sth like a banking app work PMOS, installing them in containers?
For now, but why bother formatting stuff for mobile when Linux mobile wasn't used very much yet?
Now that it's picking up steam, I can see there being mobile compatible or mobile-primary programs coming out.
KDE has been really impressive with Plasma Mobile. They have me excited. :D
I'm excited too, can't wait for it to be viable. It doesn't feel there yet though, even the site says it's not recommended for your primary phone. I checked my phone model and camera and calls and SMS doesn't work for example…
Thank you! I think we may have spoken on this once before, but I didn't recognize the name. I am now following this effort with great interest.
As long as the boot loader is unlocked I’m good.
That's next. Unlocked bootloader undermines the security features Google just implemented.
Same here, it won't personally affect me directly on my Graphene OS devices.
But with less potential users the open ecosystems like fdroid will suffer, and that will hit us, too.
I use lineage on a fairphone 4 as my daily driver but have a pmOS phone for tinkering. I have lots of hope for a mainline Linux phone future but it doesn't have the stability and support I need for daily driving just yet
Will lineage, graphene etc. Still be ok?
yes, both had an official blogpost about it. graphene has everything in seperated sandbox, lineage has a modified gapps or microg solution
I think its only google certified stuff, so anything else is completely fine.
Everything else will continue working for now, but the whole ecosystem around freely installable APKs will take a hit on the long term.
But the ecosystem for alternative operating systems will grow
This idea gives me a little hope. But really just a little.