Thanks for this! I won’t change my Phone (Samsung S21 FE) for as long as it’s working but was looking at Fairphone and Volla/Jolla as Candidates. Good to have a comparsion.
I get it it’s hard to make a good product and sell it cheaply, but at these price points, with the hardware there are providing, installing a custom ROM is the cheapest and arguably the best way to de-google.
Some of these are selling you the 5 years old hardware with today’s flagship killer phone prices. Unless there is a big change in the Android phone market, these prices for these devices will never be justified in my eyes. Not even for the native Linux experience.
I use /e/OS on my Fairphone 3+ since more than 3 years and can only recommend it!
I’ve had my hands on Fairphones and SHIFT phones. Build quality seems similar.
I’d still get a Fairphone, as they put a lot of effort into open source and being part of the community. They also seem to make slightly more robust devices.
No idea for how long Shift guarantee updates, but Fairphone guarantees updates for many years. Last I checked it was eight years.
BTW, I recently got myself a USB-C charger from Fairphone and the build quality is really good. No doubt it will still work in two years and longer. The price is also decent.
I wish one of them would be supported by grapheneos. Imo the best privacy os but only available on pixel devices
Of all of those, Punkt is the only one with a headphone jack.
What about SailfishOS?
I use it and it’s really nice.
That’s just some Linux userspace with an Android container and an Android kernel. It is mostly still Android kernel and drivers.
I don’t expect them to support devices for very long.
Definitely not mostly Android. It’s their own Linux distro/flavour with an “Android compatibility layer” like Waydroid and (gradually open sourced) system components. Ubuntu Touch has a similar approach and I believe postmarketOS as well. I really hope that Jolla’s next community device brings them some more traction and subsequent development velocity. I tried installing SailfishOS on my Fairphone 5 but it is not (yet) a polished setup experience from first boot. If they can polish that, I think it’s a great OS to facilitate a gradual move from privacy-hell. It would allow absolute must-have apps to live in locked down Android compatibility mode while there’s no viable alternative and more and more of your data living in a tracking-free OS.
libhybris literally uses an Android comtainer to bridge over Android kernel drivers from the SoC vendor to the Linux (non-Android) userland.
EDIT: postmarketOS has a mainline strategy, you could create a downstream port, but ultimately their goal is to create strong mainline support for many devices.
AFAIK they offer a way to port their OS to Android devices by re-using the drivers built for Android when building a SailfishOS image for non-native hardware. I personally wouldn’t call that “it’s mostly Android”, but that might be where we have different interpretations. Your initial comment came across as if it was a glorified launcher or a deGoogled Android. If I interpreted that wrongly, my bad. Cheers
Hmm… are you sure?
In their docs they say it uses the Linux Kernel and bridges other Linux libraries including those used in Android.
It does provide a way to install Android apps in a sandbox.
They have their own hardware phones and do support some Sony Xperia phones, which is the one I have.
It uses the kernel from the SoC vendor, for example Qualcomm, for the Xperia 10 III.
This requires libhybris to get the drivers working with a non-Android userland.
This in turn means the phone can only be updated as long as Qualcomm continues patching the kernel.
And this is why you run an outdated kernel once Qualcomm drops support, which will happen quickly. It’s the same for other SoC vendors. They are in the business of selling SoCs, not supporting them.
Mainline support solves that. SailfishOS can also be built with a mainline kernel.
I am in fact working on mainlining the Xperia 10 III. Once I’m done, you can flash an image with a mainline kernel and continue updating the kernel until the phone breaks, not until Qualcomm stops caring.
Nopein fact, Jolla with SailfishOS is the only one among those mentioned that uses an OS independently developed.
They use an Android kernel. How does it matter how nice their proprietary UI is if the phone can no longer be updated once Qualcomm, for example, no longer patches the kernel?
We desperately need more mainline support, this isn’t sustainable.
Sailfish is based on MeeGo and Moblin and itself has been around for almost 15 years.
Yeah, but that does not change anything about the kernel. You can no longer update it if the vendor drops support. Even if the distro had much older roots, it still uses a vendor kernel that has been patched to death.
