this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Reading the problems here with the pure Linux platforms, why is there no initiative to get Linux mobile up to speed? The EU at least is looking for tech independence, funding should be possible.
Issues of whether or not the EU is actually looking for tech independence aside… I find it remarkable that open source software offers so much potential for breaking free from US-dominated tech giants like Microsoft and Google, for relative pennies, and no one seems to want to pursue it. I imagine a country like France or China could develop versions of Linux (for desktop, mobile, and other applications like spreadsheets or web browsers) that blow away what we currently have for a cost that would be a rounding error of a rounding error in their current state budgets. Not sure why this hasn’t already happened, tbh.
Support.
Governments or any Organisation chooses either windows or Apple because there is a Support system in place they can rely and Shit on if Shit goes sideways.
Seems like they have been just sleeping on it.
There is. It just lacks a corporate sponsor, so it is going slowly.
Edit: It is also slowed because there is very little fully open source phone hardware, today - and of what there is, very little of it is pocket sized. This means phone OS maintainers have to rely on various hardware vendors cooperating, which is rare.
Also, the owners of the phone towers also probably don't imagine much benefit of having fully independent devices join the networks they maintain. I don't know how much help is needed from phone tower owner conglomerates, but I imagine we don't see enthusiastic support there, either.
Corporate sponsorship for GPL FOSS os will be difficult for mobile devices as they don't see value in return. They will probably go for MIT or BSD system in future
We should have now enough interest on a political level, which can well replace or create new incentive structures for the corporate sponsorship. There are also some EU phones that come with Ubuntu Touch, or Sailfish, like Jolla and Volla phone and a couple others using Android variants (e.g Fairphone) which could cooperate too. The argument with the phone towers is not familiar to me, how exactly do they benefit from the current monopolies?
I alternate between mobian and postmarketOS every coupla months, to be up to date on the state of it. I have a fast device, lotsa RAM, lotsa fast storage, switch regularly between various UIs (phosh, plasma mobile, etc)
"up to speed" is such a huge, immense, and moving target that I can't fathom the funds and dev efforts needed to get there. e.g. the plasma team has their hands full with bringing desktop plasma up to speed - 6.6 was a gargantuan effort; when you throw the mobile UI in the mix, it makes the goal exponentially farther away.
when you consider that Linux-on-Phones (just had a mental flash of Russ Hanneman saying "Radio-on-Internet") isn't one thing, there's a bunch of dev efforts, some on bare-metal, some halium based and the various UIs (gnome, phosh, plasma mobile, sxmo, etc) that all pull in different directions, solving the same thing independently, wasting time and dev efforts.
so this thing becoming an alternative to an OS that was worked on for close to two decades by the richest people on the planet - that simply isn't on the horizon, becoming an android alternative is pretty far, far away.
now, if you think of this as your linux laptop with a touch interface in your pocket, you're closer to what this thing is and can do.
It doesn’t feel so far fetched to me. People are always complaining about the same 3 technical things: VolTE, call quality and security model. Surely that’s doable? And app support, but that’s the usual networks effects problem that’s also manageable.
As to the different Linux variants, the idea probably would be to develop a canonical model with interoperability standards somehow.
Android uses the Linux kernel, maybe some parts can be migrated or used for guidance, at least. Probably not necessary.
I‘d not be intimidated by the years and money that has been poured into iOS and Android. The years are incidental, this is just the time that the companies have existed and correlates weakly with the time you‘d need to develop from scratch nowadays. They have thrown away a lot of code and years of work in the process and are likely also carrying a lot of legacy code which they‘d happily rewrite if they could start over. AI is also accelerating development. There’s also something cultural there, US tends to fund lavishly, maybe we figure out how to develop more efficiently and perhaps decentralizedly, prioritizing standards and interoperability over monopolies.
I'm telling you how things are, you're listing things you wished to be true. and that list will get accomplished by deus-ex-machinas, what's the big deal... install it on a loose device you got and try using it for a day or two.
you don't see what the big deal is? you're in a UX that was tweaked and polished for decades, and you do it almost subconsciously, whilst walking, dodging pedestrians, doing other shit, etc. this thing is in its infancy and pretty far from usable by even tech people for everyday shit, let alone normies.
the apps aren't handling the vertical UI gracefully or at all. like, plasma's settings UI doesn't collapse the categories so you can't interact with it. Gnome's ~~toggle switches~~ dropdowns only recently started reacting to touch. OSKs are now at least somewhat usable but still nothing compared to android keyboards. none of the navigation gestures you got muscle memory for work here. that's just the system's UI, before you even attempt to run apps that don't know that 300% zoomed-in, vertical UI is a thing.
the stuff you mention are so far off on the things-to-fix list, might as well not be on it.
this is a glorious platform and I love using it; but people expecting this to be a replacement for android is bordering on delusion, no such thing exists nor is it really in the works.
„UX that was tweaked and polished for decades“, cool, now we know the optimal UX and can develop the first version with it. No need to spend 2 decades again investigating, tweaking, refining, optimizing for hardware that doesn’t exist anymore, and adapting to marketing cycles to get here.
The „is“ situation is not simply extrapolatable, because now you‘ve an increased interest in technological independence. These projects have been limited to a very fringe community of tech enthusiasts and funders, which explains their state.
And the issues on a technical level shouldn’t be too major, Linux is a well proven platform, that works perfectly well on desktop, and embedded devices, and the mobile projects already exist and kind of work. With enough funding and incentive, you could probably fix all the major problems in a year or so.