Jan 5, 2026, 7:57 AMI've been out of the loop for a couple of years on Linux phones. I'm poking around on blogs and Mastodon posts, but I figured I'd just ask:
Whats currently (as of January 2026) the most functional, stable, boring phone + OS combination?
Edit: I have been so thrilled with the conversations! Thank you all for sharing projects, experiences, knowledge, and links! I'm also following a lot of new folks :) This post is at 400+ boosts, so no need to continue boosting :)
Jan 5, 2026, 8:17 AM@jbowen I'm not sure what the answer is, but I suspect it strongly depends on your position on privacy, so it might be worth clarifying where you stand on that. (like, in one interpretation of this question the answer could be a stock Pixel, if one considers Android as Linux, but I'm assuming that's not what you were going for)
Jan 5, 2026, 8:48 AM@diazona Fair point. I'm typing this on a Pixel 10, stock Android, seriously considering GrapheneOS (I've played with it in the past and was too scared to take the plunge for my daily driver).
Privacy is quite the rabbit hole. With this question it's secondary to the user experience of running a "vanilla" Linux kernel with @phosh or some other mobile UI.
I guess one way to think about it is comparing the experience of Linux on a phone to Linux on a laptop.
Are we in a 1998 level of usability?
Jan 5, 2026, 8:56 AM
Pixel 9 + GrapheneOS daily driver here.
I did buy a very cheap Samsung second phone which is basically just for my work 2FA (MS Intune + Authenticator)
Graphene is almost on par with current Android.
The consensus on best practice seems to be to set up 2 profiles on GrapheneOS, and put Google Playstore plus all the naughty apps downloaded from it and relying on Google Play services and other naughtiness in that second profile to be used only when needed.
1/2
I didn't have time to do this in one hit, so I have installed everything on one profile (sacrificing most of the privacy advantages), and am slowly building the second profile, until it's all there and I can blow away all the evil corpo shit from my default profile the phone boots into.
Apart from not being able to use Google wallet, basically everything works. Banking apps are fine.
@jbowen as far as I am aware there are no mainline linux phones that reliably make calls. There are a number of devices that are very close to having most features working, Oneplus 6, Fairphone 4/5 and Pixel 3a for example.
2026 will be a really interesting year for #Linuxmobile as camera tuning improves and device support becomes more complete.
I'm interested to learn more about how mainline linux devices can implement push notifications to wake the device.
Jan 5, 2026, 8:58 AM@dubstar_04
> I'm interested to learn more about how mainline linux devices can implement push notifications to wake the device.
Oh, I didn't know that would be difficult to do. Is it it just the enormous range of hardware and driver quirks?
@jbowen @dubstar_04 Push notifications are pretty different from regular notifications. While regular notifications only pop when the device is active, push notifications appear no matter whether the device is active or in suspend. Android has no issue with this because they implement wakelocks and thus can define what allows suspend and wakes from it. Regular Linux does have locks, but what counts isn't well defined. Also, push notifications require a server, which we didn't have for a while.
@jbowen @dubstar_04 Another issue is figuring out how to wake the device when it gets a ping from the server, which is hard to do due to the nature of suspend itself.
Jan 7, 2026, 4:29 AM@justsoup @dubstar_04 I'm bookmarking your comments to use as a launching point for what I need to read about when I have some time.
@jbowen The #pixel3a (if you have that already) with #postmarketos 25.12 Phosh should be a quite solid option, IMO.
Jan 5, 2026, 9:05 AM@rmader The 3a isn't a device I have, but I'm willing to try to get one :)
Do you mind if I ask if you're using PostmarketOS on a Pixel 3a as a daily driver? If can you both send and receive texts and calls reliably?
@jbowen unfortunately I don't use it as a daily driver yet and thus can't say much about the reliability, sorry :(
What I can say, though, is that it'll (most likely) be one of the first devices with somewhat calibrated cameras in the coming months (already playing around with that here).
Jan 5, 2026, 12:14 PM@rmader Ah, I hadn't really thought about the camera... I might have to keep a Pixel around for that
@jbowen Fairphone with /e/OS is pretty solid now.
Jan 5, 2026, 9:11 AM@pilum Do you mind if I ask if that's your daily driver?
@jbowen No, I chickened out and went for Android on my Fairphone due to mixed reports on the de facto national ID app.
But I have friends who run it, and they claim to have had no issues now.
Jan 5, 2026, 8:46 AM@jbowen I'm mostly very happy with GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 Pro.
You can run a full Linux stack on there, or do most shell things in Termux.
Mostly sensible defaults for the Android side of things - although you can ramp up the paranoia if you want.
@jbowen I'm interested in answers to this question too, and I was just reading this article that came out last week about "DeGoogled" phones; several run some variation of Android rather than something closer to mainline Linux, but some run e.g. Ubuntu Touch: https://tuta.com/blog/degoogled-phones
Jan 5, 2026, 9:28 AMThere's the modular Shiftphone (german) which runs ShiftOS, a de-googled android
or Jolla (finland) which uses sailfish to run android apps
https://commerce.jolla.com
Jan 5, 2026, 10:34 AM@lokjo Jolla has come up a few times in this thread. I wasn't aware of it before and I've seen mentions of it having proprietary components. I understand living with firmware blobs for the time being, but I'll have to do some digging to see what the proprietary comments are about.
Jan 5, 2026, 9:49 AM@jbowen I'd lean towards Jolla C2 (Sailfish OS) as a true functioning (with full glibc) device (Uses rpm packages). It's also quite large if that's any concern/bonus. Also it's from a Finnish company (Not US/China) if that's important to you.
TL;DR No NFC, No biometric auth, camera app is best described as "basic" but on the C2 (and some other devices) you get the Android subsystem to aid transition, and it will run "true" Linux/aarch64 apps e.g. https://fosstodon.org/@sxa/114160876315158082
Jan 5, 2026, 10:25 AM@SamanthaJaneSmith Yes :-) That picture is of my C2.
@sxa oh sorry I hadn't followed the link...duh!!!
@sxa what is stopping me is that Swedish banking relies on Google services .......
Jan 5, 2026, 10:56 AM@SamanthaJaneSmith So I guess it comes down to whether microG would do a good enough job. It does for some Swedish apps by the look of it: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-os/18438
@sxa oh wow...really useful. It says bankid works! Excellent. Thank you so much!
@jbowen Not Linux but have settled on iodeOS on my Sony phone. Very solid with regular updates and does its best to keep me private and untracked.
@jbowen Likely these phones are supported by Ubuntu Touch if that’s your cup of tea. Expand the tab near the top that reads “29 supported devices”:
@jbowen Thank you. What a wonderful reference for the rest of us. I hope you will keep the thread around so others can learn too.
Jan 7, 2026, 8:55 AM@skry I have no intention of deleting the thread :)
Perhaps I should have just left it as it was. I felt greedy since it was asking people to boost it when it had already been over 400 times and received a ton of great responses.
I'll certainly be going back to it over the coming months as I look at Linux phones and I hope others find it useful as well
@jbowen I was notified that the thread was ripe with good answers precisely because you edited your post and I had boosted it. That’s a great outcome from a great feature as far as I’m concerned. Thank you.