this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
973 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
63375 readers
5664 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Gimme Linux phone, I’m ready for it.
I just gave up and pre-ordered the Light Phone 3. Anytime I truly need a mobile app, I can just use an old iPhone and a WiFi connection.
The Firefox Phone should've been a real contender. I just want a browser in my pocket that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.
Unfortunately Mozilla is going the enshittification route more and more. Or good in this case that the Firefox Phone did not take of.
Is there some good Chromium browser with hardware video decoder support and a working adblocker, that is not Brave? Or which Firefox fork is recommended?
I'm sticking with Gecko for sure. Trying out Waterfox over the weekend on desktop, and Fennec F-Droid on my phone.
cromite for chrome, and ironfox for firefox?
too bad firefox is going through the way like google, they are updating thier privacy terms of usage.
Yep. I'm furious at Mozilla right now. But when the Firefox Phone was in development, they were one of the web's heroes.
it says its only for LLM? as long as they dont try to expand the "privacy" in any case i download alternatives to the browsers anyways.
I'm mostly just frustrated that the best option has now become merely the lesser evil.
if there was something that could run android apps virtualized, I'd switch in a heartbeat
Every one of them can, AFAIK. I have a second cheap used phone I picked up to play with Ubuntu Touch and it has a system called Waydroid for this. Not quite seamless and you'll want to use native when possible but it does work.
SailfishOS, PostmarketOS, Mobian, etc all also can use Waydroid or a similar thing
Waydroid?
To be clear, I haven't used it at all and have no idea how well it works.
I gave it a run on Ubuntu touch with a fair phone like 8 months ago... It was still pretty rough then.
I remember reading recently that it's gotten better (haven't tried myself so don't hold me to it). I can say that Wayland in general has come a long way since I switched to Linux ~2 years ago
There are two solutions for that. One is Waydroid, which is basically what you're describing. Another is android_translation_layer, which is closer to WINE in that it translates API calls to more native Linux ones, although that project is still in the alpha stages.
You can try both on desktop Linux if you'd like. Just don't expect to run apps that require passing SafetyNet, like many banking apps.
I know about WayDroid, but never heard of ATL.
So yeah, while we have the fundamentals, we still don't have an OS that's stable enough as a daily driver on phones.
And this isn't a Linux issue. It's mostly because of proprietary drivers. GrapheneOS already has the issue that it only works on Pixel phones.
I can imagine, bringing a Linux only mobile OS to life is even harder. I wish android phones were designed in a way, that there is a driver layer and an OS layer, with standerdized APIs to simply swap the OS layer for any unix-like system.
Halium is basically what you're talking about. It uses the Android HAL to run Linux.
The thing is, that also uses the Android kernel, meaning that there will essentially never be a kernel update since the kernel patches by Qualcomm have a ton of technical debt. The people working on porting mainline Linux to SoCs are essentially rewriting everything from scratch.
I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.
Linux on mobile as a whole isn't daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I've only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).
Do you mean sandboxed?
not necessarily... I mean If they run under the same VM, I'd be fine with that as well...but having a sandboxed wrapper would for sure be nice.