Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you’ve done on the mobile stack as well. It’s made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I’ll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)

I have a PinePhone Pro, and it runs nheko very well. Fractal is a little slower, but still usable. Not sure about Simplex I’m afraid.

I’m running postmarketOS v24.06. I could easily have messed something up though!

At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)

If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn’t work very well - either one side can’t hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It’s probably possible to fix if you know what you’re doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing :)

I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you’re happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

Good luck!

Open-source doesn’t necessarily mean private or secure.

Agreed, especially if you get your software directly from the developer. But if you get your software from a distribution that you trust, with dedicated maintainers, then the chances of such backdoors are greatly reduced.

They are the basics of modern secure OS’s

Also agreed that this is the way things are going in linux desktops as well as commercial platforms, thanks to the increasing complexity of software. These approaches are very useful if I want to run curl | bash from some random git repository, run nonfree software, or have something very important to hide on my computer.

But these approaches also come at the cost of simplicity, ease of configuration and “tinkerability”. So I think it can be valid for some people to choose not to use the approaches you mentioned, given their individual priorities.