I am an Apple person, but have been Ubuntu MATE since 18.04. I love it. Apple has been going down and down as of their OS and iOS. I am terrified as of the new 26 update. I refuse to do it as of so far. What is read is it is trash, from almost all directions online. I have seen Ubuntu Touch for some years now, and am wondering if anyone here has it and its compatibility with Ubuntu MATE 24. If this new OS is what I hear, I’m thinking of dropping apple iPhone and iOS.
What is everyone running as their Phone?? Android, iOS, PostmarketOS, Plasma,Lineage?? What kind of phone do you have with those secondary OS’s? I like the weight and feel of my iPhone 11, and I refuse to get some god awful big phone. Weight and feel of 6.1in screen and 6.8oz is good for me. Tell me your thoughts!!
I have a Motorola G 2025. That is Android. I have had almost all Motorolas. I tried Samsung A14 and had nothing but trouble with it. Both had the microphone charging port go out. It also was totally proprietary which I didn't like and tried to do everything which I hate. I am not a big phone user, want it to make calls and text, and search then Internet if I need it while away from home. I can set the Motorola up to do just that. All the phones have been lower end, between $200 - $250 when I bought them. The older phones prices seem to go down about fifty bucks when the new models come out.
So I will be sticking with Motorola. Their biggest drawback is if you like accessories you have to order them online. No one locally carries them. I have had to order the cases from Amazon.
One thing I agree with Pfos86 on is the upgrades tend to suck and make things worse both on the operating system and the apps. My phone was easy to silence with two steps, then they upgraded to this auto silence thing I didn't so want now so now it takes six steps to silence it the old way.
I have an iPhone 14 Pro. My computing ecosystem is Apple with the exception of my MATE server. I'm running the latest 26.x on all my Apple devices. Everything works, but it seems that Apple has lost its way with the concepts of "it just works" and "for the rest of us." The combination of trying to do it all with the added ever-increasing security settings make configuring an Apple device much like it used to be with the old Windoze systems. Too much "software by committee" means inconsistency in the interface.
I'm too invested in Apple to change. I've tried Android tablets, but the combination of built-in Chinese telemetry tracking and even worse inconsistency in the interface actually resulted me in throwing one against the wall in anger and frustration. No more.
I’m a power user, so I need Android to root it, add a firewall, set a system wide adblocker, remove all manufacturer’s bloatwares and use a lot of custom scripts with Tasker.
Major Android geek here, current phone is a Samsung S23 running stock firmware.
I have always bought the Samsung S series but only upgrade every 5 years or so. My previous phone is an S9 that is running a custom ROM, Lineage 23, Android 16 which I rooted a couple of days ago to see what all the fuss is about.
I had a Samsung S4 mini that came with Android 4 Kitkat, I flashed Android 7 Official Lineage build that was better than the Samsung firmware. That phone got updated to Android 11 thanks to arco68 at XDA, 7 Android versions later than Samsung provided.
I'll be switching to a Motorola with my next phone for basically the reason that all the mid-tier Samsungs like the A series have gotten huge, and are expensive for what they are. The Moto G 90 or similar seems way better bang for buck and doesnt leave as huge a dent (literally) in my pocket.
Glad to be rid of all Samsung's proprietary work too. Two software centres on one phone is a weird joke, surely!
I have no use for a smartphone since I only use a phone for taking/making calls or using SMS but since my provider stopped supporting 2G and mandated 4G I had to have a 4G compatible handset so it was the end of my good old rugged and reliable Nokia 3310
First I got by on a Nokia 8000 running KaiOS (a rebranded firefox OS) which I hacked a bit (replaced the bootloader).
I used ADB to remove some stuff and since it had a Linux kernel, I could easily set IPtables to "block everything".
Since that phone died on me I switched to a very cheap but solid Samsung Galaxy A-something running Android.
I am not really a GooglePhone fan, so I also hacked this one a bit. I used ADB again, completely tore out the Google framework (and that includes the store and all those goodies), and almost all Samsung apps (except for the soundrecorder which might come in handy). Then, again, used IP-tables to block networking completely.
The result: I have exactly what I want and my battery standby time is more than four weeks now
b.t.w. data exchange between phone and computer is still no problem (USB-C)
This is kind of what I have read, not many apps etc. Thinking of looking into Touch but there sims nil even after 4yrs of it being developed. Wondering what would work with MATE best……
Make sure you back up both google and samsung. I never made a samsung account so only backed up google and lost a lot of stuff, including some contacts when I switched back to Motorola because I couldn't access the Samsung account.
I live with (nearly) only Linux laptops in my house and Samsung A-series phones, chosen by me for 3 different persons and it works. As I have been working for Nokia in the distant past, I have more or less clue about mobile side above average user. My setup is far from ideal, but it serves 3 different people. I wish I had more free time to deepen integration, but even for now it is good enough for all of us.
As per ideal transition, Linux is fine on computer side, but I’d like to foray into European digital sovereignty direction. Most likely something Android-ish on top of Samsung or other HW.
I’ve been running the Fairphone 6 since last summer, that I bought preinstalled on /e/OS. It’s a banger.
No headache to setup, flash, and very minimal first configuration is needed to get:
Smartphone’s pictures synchronised with Nextcloud on the computer (running Ubuntu Mate of course) via Murena Cloud (I used the free 1GB cloud for some time, and then upgraded to a paid plan). Nothing to configure manually, it’s done by default byt the /e/Drive app.
Firefox on the phone (not preinstalled though) synchronised with Firefox on the computer for passwords, bookmarks and credit cards
Mozilla Thunderbird as an e-mail client on both phone and computer (QR Code now makes it instant to configure all e-mails accounts on the phone from the PC without typing credentials and server addresses manually)
Agenda on the phone synchronised with Mozilla Thunderbird Agenda on PC (The default agenda app for /e/OS has some rare bugs, but that’s easily changeable for Fossify if that’s an actual problem, also Thunderbird on mobiles does not support calendars)
The default store (App Lounge) is able to fetch apps from F-droid and Google Play without Google account. Automated updates work well most of the time but I had to trigger them manually 2 or 3 times. I recently figured out that could come from the fact that I do not reboot the phone after an OS update, that some how breaks the app lounge auto-updates
The cons:
Many banking apps (traditionally the more Google-addicted apps) work well with /e/OS although some are reported down, see this list. MicroG is embedded but might not be sufficient.
Most in-app payments are made for Google Play and you usually get an error message if you click on a “Subscribe” or “Buy” button in an app. If you can buy the thing on their website instead of their app, it works
I find it heavy but apparently iPhones are even heavier in average.
From time to time I noticed rare absence of reaction of the touch screen when I try to click somewhere. I don’t know if it’s due to a dirty screen or the OS being jerky. I usually just wipe the entire screen and wait for a few seconds, and it conitnues to work as expected.
Murena (only if you use their cloud, because you can also run /e/OS without cloud service) are reproached the major service outage of last year that lasted a long time. But given the high stakes and the difficulty to build such software infrastructure when you’re not called ‘Google’ or ‘Apple’, that’s definitely not an issue to me. Plus, outages are part of the learning curve, like all tech bros know 0:-)
The contactless payment app I’m using (Curve app) works well but I had 2 or 3 failures (I use it very frequently so it’s not a lot) with EMV message “EFFECTIVE DATE NOT REACHED“. Curve support says it’s the bank fault but I had this message with several banks. That’s embarrassing when you have no other payment method with you, but it’s rare
I will look into /e/OS, this definitely sounds like a good replacement. Thank you for all the information!! Being that it works very well with U.M. is also a very good selling point!! Thanks!!
I’m running LineageOS on Android. I love it although I’m on an older OnePlus 7T fone and Lineage support for this fone may run out soon. I bought a Oneplus 10T to use as the successor but OnePlus was bought out by OPPO and they locked down the boot areas of the fones to make them harder to recover from or install ‘alternate’ OS’s like Lineage, and maybe Graphene as well?
Anyhow I love the free open sauce Lineage OS if you can find a great android fone that supports it.
I have de-googled my fone as much as possible, that’s why I switched to Lineage. I don’t install anything direct from the app store. I don’t put personal info on my fone. No banking, no email, no POS apps (point of sale, not piece of shizz).
Some wouldn’t be interested because they think the whole point of a modern smart fone is to run all those apps …….
At home I run Debian on my main box and Ubuntu on several others with Catchy on one that I’m starting to appreciate more and more.
I’m a power user, so I need Android to root it, add a firewall, set a system wide adblocker, remove all manufacturer’s bloatwares and use a lot of custom scripts with Tasker.
I have never paid for anything with my phone and never will. To me the phones are just to unsecured. I guess I am old fashioned as I have never even used phone banking.
