Hyped to hear about their upcoming work focusing on getting devices into their main category, which is currently empty!.
I think something Graphene (and Sailfish, after Jolla stopped trying to do hardware) did well was focus on few devices and get them working REALLY well. When I visited the pmOS booth at FOSDEM last year, I asked "which phone should I get to try this on" and they basically had no real answer for me. I tried getting it on my old Xiaomi Mi 9T just to play around and the lack of drivers for stuff like camera or even knowing the current status of the battery makes it unusable as anything but a toy :(
If anyone wonders why this makes sense over SailfishOS btw, my experience is that anything based on libhybris is not a true linux experience, and will catch you offguard at random times (e.g. you can't install flatpaks at least not as easily as you would elsewhere)
As far as I know OP6 and OP6T support are pretty much the same. I'd argue OP6 is maaaybe slightly better supported (at least that used to be the case).
Another popular option right now is the Fairphone 5.
That said, this still isn't something that you should 100% rely on, read https://postmarketos.org/state to know what I mean, but basically there are still some issues that need to be ironed out, things like calling for example might be marked as working, but they may not work completely reliably. This kind of thing is hard to test but there has been effort into hardware CI to help test reliability of these features.
What I've personally seen from people daily driving pmOS is they'd typically take a secondary android phone only for calls and mobile data. That's what I'd personally recommend if you can.
I think something Graphene (and Sailfish, after Jolla stopped trying to do hardware) did well was focus on few devices and get them working REALLY well.
It's mostly because they use vendor kernels which already have all the drivers working and corresponding userspace blobs, so it all just works.
postmarketOS doesn't do this. It instead tries to use the mainline kernel as much as possible. For devices, this means rewriting drivers to get them accepted upstream, studying the downstream kernel to know what it does (and I can tell you, downstream kernels are usually a huge mess that is completely not upstreamable), working on userspace tooling, etc. This is preferable in the long term, as this means you can then use the latest and greatest kernel on, say, a 13 year old device that stopped receiving android updates ages ago (instead of some android distro that, chances are, is still stuck on a fork of Linux 3.4), but does mean hardware support is often not quite on-par with GrapheneOS or SailfishOS yet on many devices.
Hamcha | 5 hours ago
Hyped to hear about their upcoming work focusing on getting devices into their main category, which is currently empty!.
I think something Graphene (and Sailfish, after Jolla stopped trying to do hardware) did well was focus on few devices and get them working REALLY well. When I visited the pmOS booth at FOSDEM last year, I asked "which phone should I get to try this on" and they basically had no real answer for me. I tried getting it on my old Xiaomi Mi 9T just to play around and the lack of drivers for stuff like camera or even knowing the current status of the battery makes it unusable as anything but a toy :(
If anyone wonders why this makes sense over SailfishOS btw, my experience is that anything based on libhybris is not a true linux experience, and will catch you offguard at random times (e.g. you can't install flatpaks at least not as easily as you would elsewhere)
patryk | 4 hours ago
IIRC one of the best supported devices by pmOS is OnePlus 6T (and regular 6 is just a little worse)
funderscore | 2 hours ago
As far as I know OP6 and OP6T support are pretty much the same. I'd argue OP6 is maaaybe slightly better supported (at least that used to be the case). Another popular option right now is the Fairphone 5.
That said, this still isn't something that you should 100% rely on, read https://postmarketos.org/state to know what I mean, but basically there are still some issues that need to be ironed out, things like calling for example might be marked as working, but they may not work completely reliably. This kind of thing is hard to test but there has been effort into hardware CI to help test reliability of these features.
funderscore | 2 hours ago
What I've personally seen from people daily driving pmOS is they'd typically take a secondary android phone only for calls and mobile data. That's what I'd personally recommend if you can.
funderscore | 2 hours ago
It's mostly because they use vendor kernels which already have all the drivers working and corresponding userspace blobs, so it all just works.
postmarketOS doesn't do this. It instead tries to use the mainline kernel as much as possible. For devices, this means rewriting drivers to get them accepted upstream, studying the downstream kernel to know what it does (and I can tell you, downstream kernels are usually a huge mess that is completely not upstreamable), working on userspace tooling, etc. This is preferable in the long term, as this means you can then use the latest and greatest kernel on, say, a 13 year old device that stopped receiving android updates ages ago (instead of some android distro that, chances are, is still stuck on a fork of Linux 3.4), but does mean hardware support is often not quite on-par with GrapheneOS or SailfishOS yet on many devices.
gir | 2 hours ago
ohhh, just recently i upgraded my formerly supported device to 25.12 and it stopped booting. maybe i should try again with this verison :)