TuxPhones - Linux phones, tablets and portable devices

postmarketOS in 2021: over 300 devices, growing technical basis and extensive "mainline" support

About one month after targeting smartwatches and weeks after its fourth birthday, postmarketOS has met another crucial milestone for its vision of an entirely sustainable, 10+ year lifecycle for portable devices: the distribution can now boot, to varying degrees of compatibility, on over 300 machines. Deja-vu? It was exactly one

Linux Smartphone

Volla expands line-up, teases new "Phone X" model with Android and Linux

A relatively small German phone start-up, Volla, became famous in the mobile Linux community after introducing the first Volla Phone in early 2020. After one year, a concluded Kickstarter campaign and a partnership with UBPorts Foundation for complete Ubuntu Touch support, Volla has teased a new device in their "Community

Flashes

postmarketOS is finally coming to wearables

Almost four years after its first release, postmarketOS has just started targeting the valuable niche of smartwatches. As the upper end of these devices tends to offer near-identical hardware configurations to ARM phones, many models come either with Google's own Wear OS, or with proprietary themed and minified Android or

Flashes

The RUHAcam is an open-source, 3D-printed Linux camera based on Raspberry Pi

In spite of its very different appearence, this project actually shares a lot with our usually covered mobile Linux devices. Firstly, because it is a fully open-source (and open hardware-ish) portable ARM device, running on the well-renowed "Raspberry Pi HQ Camera" module, based on the Sony IMX477 sensor (12.3MP,

Linux Kernel

Tens of Nvidia Tegra devices now run mainline Linux thanks to the "grate" project

Nvidia chips and the Linux community have not always been known for a friendly attitude between each other. In a famous talk by Linus Torvalds, which may appear slightly too offensive to be reported directly, the Linux creator defined it "the single worst company [they had] ever dealt with". While

Linux Tablets

The JingPad A1 is a Linux tablet with 2K display, pen input, 5G and much more

Update 04/2021: More information on specs and hardware, pre-orders, see gallery belowSome months after the initial announcement, the first JingOS device has been officially announced. The device has been announced as a "consumer ready" full Linux tablet featuring high-end specifications such as a 2K+ display, a built-in 5G modem,

RISC-V

MIPS Technologies joins RISC-V, moves to open-source ISA standard

The MIPS silicon manufacturer is one of the oldest RISC chip manufacturers, used in several systems since the late 80s. Characterized by clean and efficient designs, allowing adaption in varied applications, this company has been considered one of the most innovative in the market during its golden age - to

Flashes

Manjaro ships Plasma Mobile 5.21, adds initial setup for PinePhone

The popular Arch-based Manjaro distribution has been one of the earliest projects to express interest in the niche of Linux phones, and has been widely adopted by PinePhone users since its initial release. However, the team never stopped being innovative, integrating crust from an early stage and supporting a wide

Wearables

Google just made sideloading Android Wear apps harder

Android Wear smartwatches are an extremely common breed of wearables. Being full of features and comparatively cheap, it is increasingly common to spot them on people's wrists. While the OS is far from flawless, partly due to the heavy Java-based software stack, bringing to usually lower the standby time than

Opinion

How anonymity overshadows real online privacy

Let's imagine that today you visited several places in a heavily video-surveilled city, while wearing a mask. Nobody knew your name or your real identity, but everyone knew what you did, in all its details. Given the unusual period, not a medical mask, but more of a full, old-school mask

Linux Smartphone

New project aims to bring Linux mobile devices back to the mainstream market

A project that has recently got the attention of many FOSS journalists is the JingOS Linux distribution, coming from China and offering an explicitly "iPadOS-style" user interface according to its website. However, this is just the beginning of the project. The fil rouge connecting the varied target market (now x86_

GNOME "Text Editor" app is a mobile-friendly, GTK4 alternative to Gedit

Edit 03/2021: GNOME Text Editor has been officially announced by its author, and re-ported to the GTK4 toolkit as initially planned. It can be installed via the Flatpak gnome-nightly repository.Given the recent progress, it seems like the GNOME foundation is taking mobile-friendliness more seriously than ever. Thanks to

postmarketOS

Linux on your smartphone: everything you need to know in 2021

One of the main issues with modern smartphones is the extremely short lifespan of this category of devices, which makes even high-end ones painfully slow within years. In fact, studies have shown that it takes the average European, American or Asian user less than two years to dump their old

Linux on iPhones

Can the Apple M1 run Linux?

UPDATE: It looks like a developer set up a Patreon for bringing Linux to the Apple M1. Although this is unlikely to be a one-man job, supporting his work may help in getting Linux to Macs faster.As most of us will know, Linux and ARM have been around for

Flashes

⚡ Plasma Mobile gets major UI improvements, several bugfixes

From being one of the earliest desktops to embrace the mobile Linux world, Plasma Mobile has already become one of the stablest and most complete mobile desktop environments thanks to continuous work by its team. What looked like a pre-alpha experiment years ago is now one of the most usable

GTK

Building responsive Linux mobile apps with libhandy 1.0 and Gtk3

November 2020: This tutorial is being updated to reflect the minor API and configuration changes in libhandy 1.0, which is the upcoming version. Thanks to Martin Chang (@marty188586) for the tipsFor those interested in using C instead of Python as programming language, developer Nilanshu Rajmane has ported our "Organizer"

RISC-V

Precursor is a RISC-V, FPGA-assisted open hardware PDA aimed at developers and hackers

A week or so after the launch of the extremely ambitious FXTec Pro-1 Android/Linux phone, sporting a hardware QWERTY keyboard and the highest-end specifications seen on a Linux phone yet, "Bunnie Studios", pseudonym for Singapore hardware hacker and digital right activist Sutajio Kosagi, have officially announced a new Linux-capable

Flashes

⚡ Ubuntu Touch is coming to the Google Pixel 3a

After Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 adding official support for a series of Oneplus (3/3T) and Sony Xperia (X*, XZ) devices, the most popular Linux distribution for phones is expanding further, with Ubuntu Touch developer Alfred Neumayer announcing upcoming support for the 2019 mid-range Google Pixel 3a smartphone. I really can&

Flashes

⚡ Official PinePhone back cover will add hardware keyboard, wireless charging, NFC and more

Just days after announcing the PineCom PDA, the PINE team has released another blog post (link below) announcing their progress for October 2020. This includes several plans, such as the PineTime budget smartwatch finally starting shipping with the Infinitime firmware, more details on the Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron (?), and more

PINE64

PINE64 to launch PineCom, a cheaper, modem-free PinePhone-like PDA

The first PinePhone, initially launched (more or less) as a cheaper alternative to the Librem 5, gained enormous success thanks to continuous efforts by both software developers and the team, releasing several variants, upgrading specifications and making this $150 Linux phone probably much better than most people would have expected,

Flashes

⚡ The status of camera on the PinePhone: drivers, autofocus, color curves and more

After many months of work, omnipresent postmarketOS developer and photography enthusiast Martijn Braam has worked on turning the PinePhone camera not only into something working, but pushing the boundaries of the entry-level OV5640 sensor and its basic lens. Image quality improvements for the #PinePhone rear camera. This is getting somewhere

Flashes

⚡ Official "Fedora Mobility" project targets PinePhone (and more)

After several years of inactivity, the official Fedora Mobility SIG team has been revived to work on bringing the popular Linux distro to the PinePhone in the immediate future, but also aims for expansion to other devices in the future. This interest may be originated from the work of @jhanikhil,

Flashes

⚡ WhatsApp and Anbox: the most popular messaging app now runs on Linux phones

As seen in several previous articles, almost all tuxphone-oriented distributions are actively working on supporting the Anbox abstraction layer in order to integrate Android apps quasi-natively with Linux ones. With Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, PureOS and Mobian supporting it, the project is getting a new wave of users from this segment

Linux on Android smartphones

Using a Google Nexus 5 as a Linux phone, in 2020

One of the main objectives of Linux is to give new life to older devices, and many projects are proving this by running (somewhat) modern UIs even on ancient smartphones like the Nokia N900. However, specifications increased very quickly in the subsequent years (2011-2013), bringing to much faster portable devices

Librem5

Purism announces Android app support for the Librem 5

While the Purism Librem 5 may not be getting the same level of attention it was during its early crowdfunding phase, its developers seem to be working harder than ever to bring all needed functionality to make this phone ready for semi-casual users as well. With their blog featuring frequent