There are too few apps on Linux phones, otherwise I would have migrated there

I have said it before: the only practical solution is two phones. Use a budget one for boring banking and government stuff. Use Linux phone for all that stuff that ad companies are actually interested in and totally cut them off from that data by virtue of actually having control. They can shove their security theatre up their ass.

Mobian is where my hope is...

you can have Android without google play services and AI and it will be still less painful experience than trying to use Linux phone as your daily driver

I wish we'd see some progress on this from the phone makers. It's so disappointing what a stranglehold Android somehow has. Nokia was so on the eve of greatness before they threw it all away and burned their good platform.

FairPhone 4 is a pretty ancient cpu. I guess it's benching a bit above the OnePlus 6/6t that has been a go-to for a good fraction of a decade now. https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/84602 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/5200

Motorola at least seems to be moving to unlock bootloaders. ARM gpus have some ok drivers now (thanks collabora & many others), which, a decade ago seemed like way way way more than the universe was ever going to allow.

I still think Samsung, with their new mountains of market cap, should try to do better. Exynos is right there, with an RDNA GPU just begging for the world's best drivers to take advantage of the hardware you already ship. You could make a stunner! Why not try?

Has anyone done Android as a I'm on a Linus phone?

spinof topic: android is still that java thingy? Or is it finally a set of modular binary specifications which are computer language agnostic?

Google is becoming more and more Evil by the day.

Some things are still funny to me, though. As Google transitions towards full Evilness, people less frequently advertise a "I was employed at Google, what a wonderful place". Google totally changed things here, to the worse - that's fascinating. Meanwhile the google graveyard is growing almost daily:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

i read on mister RMS's website that he refuses to use phones except for the most basic things, preferring a laptop for aught else, mostly because phones are computers and 'software on computers should be free'

ngl, that is the most charming darn thing to hear in 2026-- and it lowers the bar considerably here. like if all you need to have is a computer, sky's the limit on how you want to run this.

sooo with a little help from Claude I have a xmpp server running from home base+jmp for calling / sms, a portable router and a cute construction grade wp836 grandstream phone (annoyingly I can't seem to route SMS to it yet, but they route fine through xmpp on a terminal).

if you're voiping, you really don't need a voip phone though.

i have zero compunction so my computer of choice is a macbook neo... which acts as a dumb terminal for aforementioned xmpp server / wasteful videogame computer / claude butler (open the floodgates ladies and gentlemen); if i wanted cred sometimes i carry the old thinkpad around instead.

i can't say that it's any more secure than Android (using claude == i don't know what I'm doing), but it's fun? expensive fun though. JMP is a subscription, proton (for MFA and everything else) is a subscription, you need a domain for your xmpp server, ...this 'homelabbing' thing is expensive, using a map is awful (so wife is navigator...with her phone). There are many failure points, me included. but god, so fun!

i usually leave the actual cell phone at home. i do still have one. that's a hard thing to drop... but not impossible! the only holdover is learning how to use a proper camera and setting up the media server.