I don’t like smart phones & would much rather sit in my comfortable chair in front of a 24" display or two with a wireless keyboard in my lap & the wireless mouse operating well on the arm of my chair. 
Different strokes for different forkes! 
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Totally agree with you on this one, believe it or not i’ve never bought a smart phone in my life 
crazy right?, i still use an old phone with rubber buttons which doesn’t even have a camera 
so what?
Well done! I came very late to the mobile phone scene, only 'cause my ex-wife had a 90+ years old mother & I used go off camping. So my X gave me her old phone & got an update for herself. I’ve moved since those days & now mobile is the only phone that I have in my house.
Probably a pretty common scenario these days.
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You folks are lucky, I grew up in a much younger generation (I was born in 2008!) and was pretty much expected to have a smartphone when I became a teen and have been regretting it ever since XD
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There’s Jolla Sailfish: https://jolla.com
On limited hardware, and the opensource version has some limitations. But it’s probably the best option if you want a “not Android” system.
Otherwise there’s Replicant, LineageOS, /e/, and various other Android distros that remove (some of) the Google spyware.
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I bought a Pinephone just to try out alternative operating systems and apps with intentions of making a secure platform viable in my pocket.
The ultimate Android google-repellent (and what I use personally) is GrapheneOS which modifies the musl memory allocator and some other cool technical stuff to reduce the amount of things able to track/spy on you, and can block apps access to the network even.
If my understanding is correct Sailfish is not really all that open source. But at least you can still use most of the proprietary bits for free on ported devices, except for things like android support etc, and they did contribute some nice things to open source like libhybris. In terms of actual source code there was a reasonable summary on reddit some time ago:
- Device drivers. Proprietary of manufacturers (as in all mobile phones)
- Linux Kernel. Based on Vanilla, heavily patched by Jolla. Open source.
- Mer Core. Middleware software. Open source expect for two parts of Silica. Uses e.g. libhybris, wayland.
- Sailfish UI. User Interface, proprietary of Jolla. Mostly QML so quite accessible and hackable but not commercially distributable*
- Pre-installed apps. Mostly proprietary of Jolla with few exeptions. Documents and Browser have been open sourced after first release.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/73amlm/so_how_open_is_sailfish_os_really/
You can use Android apps on Ubuntu Touch (and Linux desktops) too via Waydroid. It’s probably the most mature option if you want something that’s not Android and a community run FOSS project. UT does also rely on the android drivers with no source available on most devices though.
I am pleased to be able to tell you that there is 
. Genode (discussed - albeit to a mixed reception - elsewhere in the forum) is being developed very actively for the Pine Phone. I am very excited for this development, largely for the same reasons as you allude to, that it is a European system, and will hopefully uphold our own values of privacy which is not respected by US surveillance capitalism or the Chinese “great firewall”. It is of technical parity with Fuchsia, Google’s own attempt at a replacement for Android.
how is it ??? my phone is getting tired
The Manjaro KDE touch-screen OS it came with has difficulty running updates and I haven’t tried SculptOS on it yet. I might take the advice of @PulkoMandy regarding Sailfish Free edition. The Sailfish X version is not legal to use outside of Europe for some reason (which doesn’t sound promising).
i don’t care about BS laws
@SCollins , if you want a PinePhone for primary use, skip the PinePhone original and beta editions and look into the PinePhone Pro. The pro edition has a mobile version of the Rockchip 3399 hex core but comes at a higher cost and isn’t fully compatible with the simpler quad-core PinePhone models as far as operating system selection. I have the beta edition quad-core with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB internal eMMC storage. The capacity of the pro model is similar but faster.
I have PinePhone the very basic model (2G RAM, 16G ROM) and it runs Mobian (Debian with mobile extensions) and Phosh as UI (based on GTK+). This combination fully satisfies me. Needless to say, it acts primarily as a smartphone with all GSM functions.
Additionally, Phosh allows installing and running any Linux arm64 application (not specially written for UI), even if it is not optimized for phone size and touchscreen. In this case Phosh is capable of scaling applications on per-application base. So, for me, this is the only mobile Linux UI which gives me access to all desktop Linux application out of the box, and Debian repository has plenty of applications.
Returning to this remark, it occurred to me last night that Linux could be considered a European alternative, being written by someone in Finland. As you say it does not feel like a European system anymore since Linus moved to the USA and most of the dominant firms using Linux are US. And it certainly does not count as “alternative” since the biggest mobile operating system is of course a linux distro called Android.
I suspect many of us as Haiku enthusiasts, whilst not opposed to Linux per se, are not especially interested in whilst accepting that smartphone-specific distros do meet our desire for non-commercial mobile firmware. That is why I follow the progress of Genode on the Pinephone with interest.
Good day,
I also own a Pinephone, the basic (2GB RAM, 16GB emmc -very, very, very low specs for a phone, even a linux phone-) Ubuntu Touch one. While the idea is appealing, it is sitll in a very early stage. I’ve tried almost all distros available on the Pinephone to end up that UT is the one that is “more targeted” to a phone. Also have quite some hardware issues with my device like screen flickering, device turning hot to the level of bending the simcard, issues with network stability… I was never able to use it as a daily driver anyway.
It seems that the Pinephone Pro addresses some of the issues of the original Pinephone, but at more than twice the price. At that price tag, the Volla Phone 22 is more appealing, having also the possibility of multiboot different distros. Also the finishing of the Volla Phone 22 looks more polished than the Pinephone, and priced very close to the Pinephone Pro.
Right now I’m using Lineage on an old Motorola G5s, though the process to get it installed is not straightforward, not as straightforward as loading any distro on the Pinephone. No experience with the Volla Phone as don’t have one.
Nonetheless, the biggest issue I have with any phone is the interface. Usually, interfaces don’t scale well. The only one that did scale properly has already disappeared, Windows Phone. By properly I mean that all the contents of any app resize to fit the window and expand scrolling down, or sliding to next page right, which I haven’t seen on any other interface. Besides the completely black background with white text. While not perfect, UT is the one that I’ve experienced has the best scaling and also has a black background/white text interface, instead of those trending shades of greys/browngreys/bluegreys of today.
The options are scarce and it’s not possible to test them all together to evaluate, as only option is: buy a Pinephone Pro, buy a Volla Phone, buy a regular phone that allows installing Lineage (or other AOSP ROM derivative), put them side by side, compare.
I’ll stick with the Lineage for the time being, while keeping an eye on the Pinephone Pro and the Volla Phone. If their price drops, I might go there.
Regards,
RR
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As PulkoMandy mentioned, there are open source degoogled Android ROMs, the most user friendly imo being /e/ by Murena, which I use myself and I found the experience excellent. It’s actually much better and faster than the bloated stock rom. You are trading some security (they are still a bit slow with patching vulnerabilities) for much improved privacy and a much wider range of supported devices than other security or privacy focused Android projects.
They also sell phones with the rom pre-installed, which can be recommended to novices who would struggle with unlocking bootloaders and flashing roms.
I haven’t tried their Nextcloud-based cloud offerings since I have a Synology NAS for everything I need, but it seems to work well for others.
@squizzler , actually, you’d get a few arguing with you about your “Linux could be considered European alternative, being written by someone in Finland”. The GNU people used Torvald’s kernel “Linux kernel” to build the GNU Linux OS on top of.
I don’t have a dog in this race. I’m just saying, Torvald’s kernel, with GNU OS on top. Luckily Richard Stallman isn’t here… lol
Very good point, and I am usually a bit of a stickler for terminological exactitude! To my defence I did say “Linux” was a European development, not “GNU/Linux”.
Your point also applies to Android. I am not sure how much of the broader “GNU” is included but since the popular desktop alternative is properly called GNU/Linux, perhaps Google’s mobile phone OS should really be named “Android/Linux”? Actually, having written that, it strikes me not to be such a bad idea, since they could call their new Fuchsia system Android/Zircon (zircon is the Fuchsia kernel) and thus keep their Android branding.
Ultimately I agree a EU desktop/mobile system would be a fine development, and even if it is free to everyone, GNU/Linux is not it.