this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
1385 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
84302 readers
4123 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- 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, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- 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
Please consider donating to PostmarketOS to build up a pure mobile Linux alternative that is completely free of Google's influence. It's the best option we have.
Just signed up to donate 5 euros a month. Took me about 45 seconds.
Legend! :D
What about fairphone? Don’t they run a Ubuntu option?
The issue with Ubuntu Touch is that unfortunately it uses an outdated Android kernel (which is also usually not receiving security updates) and a Halium abstraction layer to access the closed source binary blob Android drivers for the phone’s hardware. It also requires that it be installed on top of an existing Android install, so in all it’s more of Linuxified layer on top of Android, which means it’s not truly escaping the control of the Android/Google ecosystem.
UBPorts also appears to inherit the use of CLA's from Canonical:
I'm very much not a fan of CLA's., which SailfishOS also employs.
The advantage of PostmarketOS (even though it is not ready as a daily driver for the average person), is that it uses the upstream Linux kernel with open-source GPU/hardware drivers, not an Android kernel to access the outdated proprietary GPU/Hardware blobs.
The other problem is that Ubuntu is the "How do you do, fellow kids?" of FOSS operating systems.
It suffers from that less now since Canonical abandoned the project. UBPorts is AFAIK just a community project to keep it alive. I would've assumed they would drop the CLA stuff, but I guess they didn't want to or couldn't for whatever reason?
Hijacking as I've done on other posts. In my country all 3 major tellcos needed to verify phones can call emergency on VoLTE.
FP5 does this. For whatever reason the telcos cant "conform" that (its not sold here but important and DOES work) so the device is blocked at a network level.
Not blocked just for calls but even data.
Phone is now a brick. Double brick once the Android changes roll through.
Damn, that sucks. What country does that? (If it's large enough to not dox yourself, of course)
Sounds like Australia to me.
Damn. The guy just doxed himself.
no they don't. they do have a partnership with Murena, which sells them preinstalled with /e/, which is a degoogled Android ROM. there is a Ubuntu Touch port available for some Fairphone models though.
So that would be a yes. Yes they do.
And Why are we being confrontational about this?
I thought graphene was the best daily driver for the moment ?
Graphene is currently the best daily driver for the average person, but as they are a hardened Android fork, they are still somewhat reliant on Google playing ball.
PostmarketOS is not ready for the average person, but it is our best long-term option since it is not based on Android at all.
Is it though?
Wow, that guy is an absolute putz. Like, postmarketOS literally tells you that their shit is not ready for prime time and to be ready for it to be a little bit wonky right now. And this guy is acting like they're advertising it as it is ready for Freddy and it's just garbage or something. Not to mention the way he installed it was just stupid. My 8-year-old niece could do this better than he did.
I think I'll find a video made by somebody more competent.
He's a comedian. His videos aren't meant to be taken seriously.
Comedians really need to stop using that line to justify being putzes, as it ignores the fact that they have a very real influence on people's perceptions, and therefore the decisions they make and the overall trajectory of society.
Every media personality needs to recognize this responsibility, regardless of whether or not their content is intended to be "serious."
"It's just a joke, bro." Yeah, well your "joke" is actively harming the development and adoption of one of our only potential ways out of this duopoly of walled gardens.
The channel description says
and that seems about right from the handful of videos I've watched. He spends a lot more time mocking big tech firms than poking fun at Linux.
If his intention is to mock big tech, then mocking linux and the only viable alternatives to big tech is kinda misplaced.
The intention is to mock everything in tech. He mostly mocks big tech, but nothing is immune.
Is that why Resonosity posted it as a hyperlink questioning whether it's the best option we have at the moment?
People shouldn't joke about Linux phones because somebody might not get the joke?
On the other hand, there's a truth underlying the joke: Linux phones are only really ready for a narrow set of users. I say that as a partial member of that set: I have PostmarketOS installed on a phone. It's fun to play with, but I wouldn't like to use it an my main phone yet. I hope it gets there some day.
Okay, well there's an honest way of saying "it's not quite ready for use as a daily driver yet, but the devs are actively working towards it" (which Postmarket openly admits) and saying "It's a piece of shit, it's unusable" like the guy in the video says.
Imagine there's an election coming up and these are the two candidates in your district: "Yeah, we're going to lock you out of your houses if you don't buy our special keys from us, you can only install appliances that we approve of, and only come and go from your house to go where and when we approve." And the other guy is saying "That's bullshit, no one should have that much power over your personal choices. We're going to make sure that never happens."
And you repost a video of a "comedian" trashing the second candidate because he was a bartender in college, or he wears tan suits, or eats dijon mustard, or laughs funny.
Do you see the issue?
He doesn't say anything like that. He points out the notice it shows on first use saying it's unfinished and soliciting bug reports, then ends by acknowledging they're working for free and it's a work in progress. Despite the comedic tone, that's an accurate assessment; PostmarketOS is currently suitable for hobbyists and developers only.
In the middle he tries several times to make a phone call and never succeeds. If anybody is treating this as a serious review to decide whether they should use the same setup around the time the video was published, "unusable" might indeed be a reasonable conclusion, assuming they want to make phone calls on their phone.
Ah, well you caught me. I didn't actually watch the video. I was just going off of the comment above that said:
Long-term, yes. It isn't ready as a daily driver for the average person (hence why I used the term 'build up'), but there is realistically no other option that can truly be called community owned like PostmarketOS can. It's our best shot at a permanent non-enshittified platform, it just needs our support so it can become polished and support more phones :)