I am daily driving my PinePhone Pro running manjaro (Plasma Mobile) for about a year now. I can say, it is definitely daily driveable with some exeptions/limitations:

• The Battery life is horrible, like 3 h max usage from a battery. But since the batteries are cheap and can easily be swapped, I just have 4 of them to get through the day
• The camera is working in the sense, that it can make pictures. If you want nice pictures, bring a separate camera
• From time to time, cellular network connectivity drops out for short moments

Other than that it is pretty much functioning as a real phone. Of curse there are not that many apps. Telegram works natively and flawless, but whatsapp needs to be used via Whatsapp Web. For syncing all my documents and files I use nextcloud which works without any problems (once set up)

There is also the non Pro Version of the PinePhone, which is much slower, but has a better camera software and longer battery life (and is cheaper)

GNU/Linux on Phones are far from Android, but we slowly getting there. So if you want a better experience, just buy a phone that can run a community Android distribution like LineageOS.

But if you are an advanced user and really want to use GNU/Linux on your phone, then I would recommend buying a PinePhone Pro + Pine keyboard (there is a bundle on their website). The keyboard is needed because it extends the battery life (without it the battery life is horrible) and compensates good swipe touch keyboard typing (we currently don’t have a touch keyboard with swipe feature). I daily drive this phone on ArchLinux with Plasma Mobile and I satisfied with the result.

I’m currently using a PinePhone Pro as my daily driver and if you want something to play around with that’s definitely an option (though the PinePhone is probably a little more stable and less tinkery).

If you care less about it being a “free” phone built specifically for Linux and just want something that works, then rooting some older phone with good support will probably provide a better experience.

pinephone. but i just use it for fiddling around as too much stuff does not work.

I’ve tried Linux for phones and it’s come a long way. However, it’s just not there yet in my opinion. Getting deep sleep and power management right is incredibly difficult and the tech giants still struggle to get it right after all this time.

You can buy a Linux phone from places like PinePhone, but those aren’t very fast. You can also try to get Linux onto an Android phone through UBPorts or PostmarketOS; those are probably better bang for the buck options, but be sure to check compatibility before you buy a phone/install Linux.

If you go the Linux route, you can try running Android apps through Waydroid (or Anbox). It’s far from perfect, but quite a few apps will work on it.

If you just want to use your smartphone without tech giants, I’d recommend grabbing any phone that supports LineageOS and not installing Google Play services. You’ll get all the benefits of Android as a supported platform, with none of the Google downsides. Through F-Droid you can get things like browsers and file explorers that are all open source. You can also use services like Aurora to download apps from the Play Store, but many of them won’t run well without Google Play Services installed. You can install MicroG as an open source Play Services frontend but that’ll still communicate with Google.

You could also buy an /e/ device or flash the /e/ ROM onto it. This is a custom ROM distribution forked from the popular LineageOS ROM with cross-integrated replacements for most common smartphone apps, but under their open source server platform rather than through a big cloud company. You can run the /e/ server stack yourself, giving yourself cloud storage/email/etc, or you can subscribe to /e/ and get an account there. However, /e/ doesn’t seem to be very up to date with recent LineageOS releases, so you may want to double check if you’re getting all the updates before committing.

Nextcloud is a strong contender for cloud storage. You can also try Seafile or other alternatives, but Nextcloud supports address book and contact list sync in the free version, which its competition lacks or puts behind a pay wall.

Phones that run mainline Linux are seldom. The only ones that come to my mind are PinePhone Pro (outdated hardware, 400 bucks) and Librem 5 (also outdated hardware, incredibly expensive 1300$ !). If you are serious get the PinePhone Pro. But expect pitfalls because you can’t just run Android apps.

Nextcloud is still the best option for self hosted cloud services.

You have to find a phone that is compatible with open source Linux Phone OS. Most of the OS websites give a listing of what phone make/model works. FYI, almost all the Google Pixel phones work.

Here are a few I am keeping an eye on when my Pixel 4a/5G stops getting updates from Google…this year. /

LineageOS/ GrapheneOS/ CalyxOS/ e.foundation/

Youtube videos and other websites are good sources on how to install, etc.

I hope one day we can get a framework phone

Why would you want a Linux phone. Linux, especially on phones is insecure! Go with an Android phone