this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Linux Phones
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The Discussion on Linux-based Phones.
Benefits:
- Hardware freedom.
- Perfect operating-system competition.
- Full utilization of specs.
- Phone lifespan raises to 10+ years.
- Less e-waste.
Linux Mobile Distros:
- Ubuntu Touch
- Sailfish
- FuriOS
- Postmarket OS
- Mobian
- Pure OS
- Plasma Mobile
- LuneOS
- openSUSE Mobile
- Nemomobile
- Droidian
- Mobile NixOS
- ExpidusOS
- Maemo Leste
- Manjaro Arm
- Tizen
- WebOS
Linux Mobile Hardware:
- Fairphone 5
- Volla Phone
- PinePhone
- FLX1
- Librem 5
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With the fact that Google is talking about controlling our devices, I am seriously considering going to a Linux phone even if it is a step down in user experience, just to give the middle finger to Google. I already run Lineage OS without Google Play Services, but I'm beginning to become afraid that they're going to lock down AOSP to where you can't install applications either.
Like sure, for now, it's only going to be on devices with Google Play services. But what's to stop Android 19 from being released and making it to where you can't even do it on AOSP?
It's not much choice if only iOS and Android are on offer, so it's great to see alternatives that work. That being said, I'm considering a dumb phone and a small data-enabled Linux tablet.
How do you survive without Google services? Did you have to unlear / switch a lot of stuff? Like gmail?
Not OP but I like to share my experience.
I have never been entangled too much with Google, so getting away for me was more like choosing a different path from the beginning than finding my way back.
I use Posteo for my mails. It's one Euro a month and comes with contacts and three free calendars I can sync using DAVx5. This works perfectly. I use CoMaps for navigation and a funny old TTS engine called eSpeak. It doesn't have traffic yet, but the EU told all members to openly share all traffic information, so I'm looking forward to that. Until then, I drive without that information, which was perfectly fine until like 7 years ago. What else? Aurora Store to get a hand full of apps from the Play Store like Signal and Banking. That's it. You just decide to live without it and do it.
I was pretty tangled in the Google ecosystem and so ended up switching to a lot of proton stuff such as proton mail primarily. I replaced Google Street Maps with OsmAnd and for getting addresses I use gps-coordinates.net to convert addresses like 123 Main Street, Washington, D.C., United States into GPS coordinates so that OSM can understand them better. I would still once in a great while bring up the Google Maps website to get directions for something, but found out recently that they stopped allowing you to get directions if you didn't have the app, so was just looking at MapQuest. As of now, I haven't had a Google account since January of 2023, and the only Google service I regularly interact with is YouTube through a third-party front-end called NewPipe. I try to find channels on other services such as PeerTube and have some success, but YouTube is the main anchor that still is a Google service that I interact with at all.
I use Geo Share to covert map links