Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 0:42 UTC (Wed) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962)
In reply to: Perfection is the enemy of good by pizza
Parent article: The FSF's Librephone project

Having a phone with kernel and userland drivers from postmarketOS and the Android UI from LineageOS would be a nice baseline from a usability perspective (Android apps available, and still kernel+userland completely free).

I love my postmarketOS phone and it is the most mobile Linux "desktop" I ever had, but it fills a different niche (Linux+mobile feeling) compared to the Android feeling. For me, right now the answer for "postmarketOS vs. LineageOS" is "both", each on its own device.

That said, I mostly agree with the previous poster on the unfortunate requirement of proprietary firmware blobs as those are not likely to go away soon. Having a free Android-style kernel+userland combined with firmware blobs is probably a realistic 2-year goal on a very limited set of phones. If blob-free implementations are a hard requirement, the easiest way to go forward is to remove/outsource the mobile radio functionality to a dedicated device and use VoWiFi on a blob-free handset. That way you could even get a RYF certification for the handset because the blobs live in a different device. The usuability would be severely limited, though.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 1:01 UTC (Wed) by ttuttle (subscriber, #51118) [Link]

I mean, what you've described -- considering both parts -- isn't something most people would consider a phone.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 3:03 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I've only played a little with postmarketOS, the GNOME variant, and it looked like you could run waydroid on it, but I haven't had time to fiddle with it properly, is it possible to run F-Droid and Android apps on a postmarketOS phone, so you can get the best of both? Or are the other postmarketOS UI spins just as totally unfinished as the GNOME one, so only suitable for the enthusiast who wants a *Linux* phone.