I've been out of the loop for a couple of years on Linux phones. I'm poking around on blogs and Mastodon posts, but I figured I'd just ask:
Whats currently (as of January 2026) the most functional, stable, boring phone + OS combination?
I have a PinePhone from a few years ago and a couple Pixels to play around with.
(If you're comfortable with it and feeling generous, I would appreciate a boost for visibility)
@jbowen I'm interested in answers to this question too, and I was just reading this article that came out last week about "DeGoogled" phones; several run some variation of Android rather than something closer to mainline Linux, but some run e.g. Ubuntu Touch: https://tuta.com/blog/degoogled-phones
@jbowen I'm mostly very happy with GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 Pro.
You can run a full Linux stack on there, or do most shell things in Termux.
Mostly sensible defaults for the Android side of things - although you can ramp up the paranoia if you want.
@jbowen Fairphone with /e/OS is pretty solid now.
@pilum Do you mind if I ask if that's your daily driver?
@VincentTunru @jbowen @pilum I use an /e/ Fairphone 4 I bought from Murena as daily driver, and three banking apps that work just fine (all of them installed using Murena's own appstore which uses an anonymous google play session somehow)
@VincentTunru @jbowen @pilum plus one (Fairphone 6 + /e/OS), I'm coming from a degoogled Pixel 5 (Calyx OS, similar to Graphene OS which I want to experiment with also on the old phone). You will really want Aurora or similar to access the Play Store for "normie" things like banking apps and non-FOSS software in general (it's built-in on /e/OS out of the box) but it works really well. The Fairphone 6 has its own camera app which also came to /e/OS with the latest update and it really makes the phone camera capable/on par with mid-tier phones in that regard also.
