Hong Kong's Furi Labs shakes up smartphone scene with dash of Debian Furi Labs' FLX1 is a Debian-based smartphone with decent specs at a competitive price. At any good conference, the "corridor track" is always a highlight and one of the experiences that virtual events so far haven't managed to reproduce. At this year's DevConf.cz, the undoubted highlight of the corridor track for The Reg FOSS …
[Author here]
> a shame it has links to China though
Well, you could be right there, but virtually every phone chipset is Chinese-made these days. That's why the made-in-USA Librem 5 is even more expensive than the standard one.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
$999 instead of $699 for the one with Chinese parts:
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
What Furi Labs looks like to me is a Chinese OEM working with a team from several other countries (India, Australia and others) to help build a more open set of software support, which is for this industry long-term thinking -- and I think that's good.
[Author here]
> It means it runs on top of Android kernel and drivers and doesn't use Debian for that.
No, it soes not mean that, or I would have said that.
As the previous comment to yours correctly noted, it's Debian with a bundled container that holds a copy of Waydoid:
https://waydro.id/
Because getting the kind of hardware needed to build that phone is not easy. As far as I can tell, there are almost no phones with 24 GB of RAM. Unless you're including the popular tactic of Android makers to turn on what's effectively swap space then report that as RAM anyway, you've got a phone that's pretty rare.
For instance, they mostly have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. There are three problems with using this SoC in a Linux phone. The first problem is that you can't just buy a few of those. Qualcomm wants big orders from established companies for chips like that. If you're smaller, you're not just selecting a lower quantity, you're not paying a higher price so you can have a smaller quantity, you're not getting them at all. Second, they need something they can get Linux drivers for and, depending on who they think their customers are, as few proprietary blobs as possible. Some people won't mind some proprietary modem firmware, while others will dislike this immensely and want something like the Librem or PinePhone which isolates it (PinePhone has some attempt to custom-build firmware for it). None of that is available for flagship chips. Many midrange chips don't have it either, so you have to be careful with which one you select. Third, they're trying to sell these things, and if they cost a ton, which all 24/1024 phones do, many otherwise interested people won't buy them. There's only so big a market for expensive phones, and that market gets a lot smaller when it's not an established company and they're intentionally making a device that's not as compatible as others.
Yeah, I mostly want to try alternative (preferably linux-based) phone operating systems to prolong the life of my devices. My current phone is a (U.S. version) Samsung Galaxy S10 from 2019. It is no longer supported, and is stuck on a now 3ish year old version of Android. The hardware is still in great shape, so I'd love to be able to keep it going for years to come, but I can't find an alternative OS that can be installed on it. In a year or two, I suspect that many of my apps will stop supporting my older Android version, and I'll be forced to retire a perfectly good phone. I've no desire to pay $500 just to try out an OS that may not fit my needs, let alone $1000 for flagship level hardware.
LineageOS has four S10 builds, all for 2019 models. I've no idea how many versions of the S10 there were but Wikipedia suggests five, the last of which was a 2020 model (and for which there appears to be no Lineage build).
They all have similar specifications (same CPU, same graphics, same screen (except S10e), same main cameras), differing in detail (total RAM and storage, networks, minor cameras, some sensors). If your S10 is similar then maybe there's a not-official Lineage build for it somewhere if you look hard enough?
M.
There's a couple of guides online on how to get Lineage on there. Most out of date so you'll have to freestyle for a bit. Note that once you get Lineage on there and you spend an evening putting all your apps on it etc and go to put an actual SIM card in, you'll want to be sure your network doesn't require VoLTE as that won't work.
Most (all?) networks in Australia require VoLTE so you may be left with a nice Wi-Fi-only device and a bunch of swear words.
I love using my PC's all of which are Linux based (POP-OS) and yes I am very happy with it as my 100% daily driver, no MS Windows Apple products whatsoever. But sadly I still have to use an Android phone but only for phone calls, texts and Plants vs Zombies. I will not use my phone for any internet browsing or any apps except the camera and Gallery apps. So a Linux phone would should easily fulfill my needs until they can fix Firefox etc. I just don't like the idea of constantly worrying about my phone device spying and collecting personal data on me which I can imagine a lot of other people feel the same.
[Author here]
I do not think that is correct, no. This device reported itself as running Debian Trixie with kernel 6.8.
Droidian does use some existing Android-VM-based methods to get driver support, yes, but then so does Ubuntu Touch for instance.
https://github.com/droidian/droidian
However, the idea behind Furi Labs is to work with the hardware vendor to get native support working and then upstream it.
If you believe differently or that this is not the case, then by all means do some investigations and share your findings.
I am, as I said, trying to get hold of a review unit for some deeper investigation.
Just look at https://furilabs.com/changelog/. It's obvious it's Droidian and uses Halium. The userspace comes from Debian Trixie so it will identify as such, but many components are heavily patched and glue layers are used (such as ofono2mm, out-of-tree wlroots backend etc.).
Ubuntu Touch has two variants, one based on Halium used on Android-first devices and one closer to regular GNU/Linux distro stack. Droidian is like the former, while Debian/Mobian is like the latter. This one is based on Droidian.
The first few questions in the FAQ cover the difference:
https://github.com/droidian/droidian/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions-%28FAQs%29
It sounds like Furi Labs are starting with Droidian because some of the hardware only has a closed Android driver. If they manage to open or even upstream all the drivers they can move to mobian. IIRC some of the problems with Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone were because it has native drivers not android ones.
Yup, Ubuntu Touch as made by Canonical was basically meant only for Android phones, which is why porting UBports to PinePhone or Librem 5 needed plenty of work - they were the first devices UBports could target that didn't actually rely on Android, so UBports had to be made to work without Android layers underneath. Droidian went the other way - it took an already functioning mobile GNU/Linux distro (Mobian, which is a blend of Debian) and put it on top of Android, so it could run on Android phones.
Mobian devs don't provide support for Droidian. Calling this phone "Debian-based" without additional qualifiers is misleading.
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