Here’s a review of my experiences with Droidian on a Google Pixel 3AXL. It was my overall best experience with a Linux mobile environment so far!
Thanks also to Techlore for explaining so clearly what Matrix is and how to access it in this video!
That helped me a lot, and I got to chat directly with the developer of the Flare (Signal) app when things didn’t work.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, it was quite an interesting read.
I played around with Linux on touch devices myself and I got very frustrated. Reading your report, it might a difference in attitude that prevented me from enjoying the it. Crashes, keyboard not coming up, default applications not scaling correctly, getting an numeric keypad on a lock screen to input a password and other obviously stupid things frustrate me to no end.
I’d really love to have at least one Linux touch device (one without a physical mouse and keyboard, the experience is fine when you can use those).
Hopefully Drodian will mature a little bit more. I’d like to use my old Pixel 3a as a Linux music & audiobook player and e-book reader for example. But the user experience must compare to my Android phone, at least for the limited application scope I choose for the device.
If there is ever significant progress in that direction, I’d be happy to read about it.
I think that for that type of use case, you might want to give Droidian a shot now. To be honest, I was and am very tempted to use it as my daily driver (especially now I’ve learned that nextcloud-desktop actually works), but GrapheneOS on the later Pixel model is just nicer and quicker. But as a second device with a specific purpose like you say, I think that might actually work well today.
I’m surprised I enjoy the frustration so much. I think messing around with phones and other devices like this is my Sudoku.
That’s just a me problem … I do a lot of messing around with tech, maybe to much sometimes. I’m also very focused on finding solutions that can feel like professional products. - I’ve got a lot of those, but want more.
Well, I would say that if you have the Pixel 3AXL lying around, then Droidian is worth a try. Having the Mobile Settings tool running (on Compositor option) while you try things is extremely helpful for scaling, but see the apps I list as working in the blog post. Those are all really solid, in my experience.
why would you use a outdated device?
I explain that in the beginning of the blog. The Pixel 3A and 3AXL seem to be devices a lot of current Linux mobile operating systems are optimised for.
It may not be secure now, but in the long run, having Linux mobile on Linux hardware is our best bet for an alternative mobile system. Otherwise we will always be beholden to the whims of Google etc.
yup unfortunately support for linux mobile is very limited. In fact I would love to try it from my pixel 7 at some point but it is not yet supported so there’s that.