In response to community feedback, Liberux is adding a cheaper, entry level option to it’s crowfunding campaign
I like how their idea of entry level is a 16GB RAM phone for €890.
It’s a bit diffident when you don’t have big megacorp subsidies (Meta, Google, various local-market apps, etc) & have to buy all hardware from third parties. And perhaps not have planned obsolescence. And upsales. And ad revenue. And frown upon slave or unhappy workforce & other negative society impacts.
Also it looks like an ok phone, low spec cameras, but still the usual dimensions, OLED, enough RAM & CPU to be usable in desktop mode, Linux.
well I guess it cannot run medium sized AI models or something. but also, the question arises what is their price for a mid level phone
Cool to see a Linux smartphone, but holy moly, what a terrible name!
@carzian I paid about $60 for a used unlocked Galaxy Android phone, whatever the dollar equivalent of 890 euros is, it’s out of my budget.
what was the price before?! lol
Another model they put on Indie Go Go is €1300.
€890, meh
Pardon my ignorance, but why people keep trying Linux phones when you can develop on top of open source android version, like GrapheneOS? Linux desktop apps are not exactly secure.
Because the Android SDK is owned and controlled by Google. They’ve consistently made decisions to make it harder to stay out of their ecosystem (like the new “Integrity” API).
As consumers, we would vastly benefit from having another choice that isn’t controlled by one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Yes, this.
Google is slowly but consistently closing down the ecosystem (that should have been openv all the way through anyways).
Just like with the search engine, the early ad-free serve-everyone-equally stage is dead. Now the monopoly is about to monetise what it can & control all the things.
(Thighs might escalate a bit quicker since the “Googles android” is prob at it’s peak market share rn & the China alternatives are gonna steamroll even oven giants like Google and Apple to a significant extent.)
I can’t talk for others I’m personally interested in Linux phones (I have 2, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro) because I do not want to rely on Android because it’s lead, maintained and basically in practice owned by Google.
I would also much prefer to have “just” Linux because I know it better and because IMHO we reached a point, already few years ago, where “mobile” does not mean much anymore. “just” a computer with a battery is enough due to the power available.
IMHO the SteamDeck is the existence proof of that.
Linux desktop apps are not exactly secure.
Can you please clarify?
The “know it better” is, I think, a big argument, that’s imo often a bit overlooked. Android does not have that much “hackers” as “proper” Linux has. For the average Gnome DE @ Ubuntu user, Android forks are fine. But if you’re the kind of person, who searches for random scripts on Github, you won’t get that experience on LineageOS.
… so why are eg flatpak apps less secure than Android ones?
And Play & Apple stores are full of unchecked scam apps. They basically are solving this by securing the os more. Yet apps (even Instagram) can still take pics without your action. I assume they listed in on you too.
The app (& SDK) argument I think has more to do with user- and dev-base. Something that Microsoft failed at in the mobile market. So basically we need a quality/seamless way of running Android apps on Linux.
And since we can run Win games on Linux very nicely I think this wouldn’t be that much of an issue … Tho minimal industry support (eg banking apps) is still needed.
we need a quality/seamless way of running Android apps on Linux
Like Waydroid? There was a thread recently on that and it seemed (even though not necessarily a representative sample) most people used it for… games, not “actual” applications. They were NOT used for banking apps also (at least I don’t remember anybody mentioning that) because I bet most people just go on their bank website for that.
convergence!
Well you could plug a PinePhone on… pretty much anything with a USB-C dongle. I did plug it on a large (like… 70") screen and a mechanical keyboard and mouse mostly for testing purposes. It was cool. Still it felt under powered compared to even an entry level laptop modern laptop so… conceptually yes, in practice, meh.
You don’t think with the proper specs that it could behave much more akin to a modern laptop? Not to overhype or anything, but it feels like people have been waiting on something like this for a long time.