Tzafrir
@tzafrir@cohens.org.il
I have so far not switched to it because it will take time. My initial impression is that it is much closer to a Just Works[tm] phone that I can actually recommend people to use. I guess I'll report about that later once I started using it.
There are two things I'm concerned about:
First off: mainline kernel: The phone is based on an Android kernel and a translation layer. This is simpler in the short run, but is more difficult to support in the long run. In the booth, the developer mentioned some plans (though nothing concrete) to switch to mainline kernel. I hope this works out.
But more importantly: what is the relation between this project and the rest of the #MobileLinux community? The @furilabs@fosstodon.org booth at #FOSDEM25 was in building AW (next to some interesting embedded stuff) and not next to the three other Linux-mobile booths. They were hardly mentioned in the Linux On Mobile talks track .
The phone itself seems to use something that is quite an up-to-date #mobian (#debian) system. I still need to figure out if I can also use it as a developer phone.
Anyway, it's good to see more people making Linux phones proper products. I really hope that their improvements will be shared with the rest of the community where applicable.
One basic issue is missing some basic documentation. There is no simple drawing of the phone to note which thing is which. It took my quite a while to realize how to replace the SIM card. Yes, maybe it is me, but I think you do aim for the masses, and adding such a thing somewhere on the web site does not cost much and reduces cost of support.
=== Doesn't yet work: ===
Podcasts: I imported my podcasts to kasts from my old phone. Next time I tried to start kasts, it crashed. I failed to get any useful information from the core dump. gnome-podcasts is currently not in Debian because of some new rust dependencies. It's work in progress but I'm not sure it will make it to Trixie. And anyway, it's not as good as kasts.
Screen on USB-C: Worked nicely on Pinephone. Doesn't work on this one. Not a must-have feature, though. And of all the Linux mobile interfaces, phosh is really not well-adapted to using it.
=== Extra Settings ===
I dislike random long interface name on my laptop and want to give more predictable ones. I tend to do that using .link files in /etc/systemd/network (not related directly to networkd). For instance, I have a file there to rename "enp61s0u2u4" (from my docking station) to "ethhome". I have various pinephones, and I could tell between the different ones using the property (See output of 'udevadm info /sys/class/net/
') IDSERIALSHORT. With the FLX1 I can easily give a name to an interface name for a single phone, but would not be easily able to tell the difference between two different ones.
