A Review of postmarketOS on the Fairphone Gen 6+

Over the past 2 weeks, I've been daily-driving postmarketOS with phosh on a Fairphone Gen 6+ (From now on called FP6). I had previously been using a Fairphone 4 (FP4) with lineageOS, but I've had a good bit of experience with degoogled Android before that, including CalyxOS on the FP4 and /e/OS on a Samsung Galaxy S8. I'd like to document the parts I like about it, and expectedly, the parts that really aren't ready for use yet.

I hadn't been planning on getting a newer Fairphone for a while (at least wait til Gen 7), but I left my FP4 in a Tesco and it got nicked. Oh well ;P

What Went Well

Networking and Personal Information Management

GNOME's always had very strong online account features, and has the combination of not assuming that the user uses a particular ecosystem (see: /e/OS basically assumes that you have a Nextcloud). GNOME doesn't care if you use Nextcloud, Microsoft, or just something that exposes a webDAV and IMAP - it'll all appear in system apps all the same.

Part of this seems to me to come from some of the specific benefits of a coordinated vision that Linux can benefit from in a way that's been mostly inaccessible to degoogled Android ROMs. While obviously Linux distributions are made of a lot of components by a lot of different projects, the UI layer is usually centralised under one project and one vision (GNOME, KDE, elementaryOS, etc). On the other hand, a degoogled Android ROM's UI features are going to be a mixture of AOSP, F-Droid, microG, Aurora store, bespoke apps, and so on.

Compare, for instance, PIM in a degoogled ROM to that in Phosh. In Phosh, you sign in in GNOME Online Accounts, and you have access to mail (if using a GNOME mail client), contacts, calendars, the works. In LineageOS, I have to think about DAVx5, ICSx5, the Nextcloud app, and whatever calendar and contacts app my ROM is using. The difference in experience is night and day. /e/OS tries to paper over this but doesn't - I still find the same OS flows taking me to DAVx5/ICSx5 under the hood. In general, I find a lot of the time when Android ROMs try to integrate OS-level features they really just look like having an entry in settings redirect to an app - I see you, Seedvault hiding in LineageOS settings. In Linux, the whole stack belongs to us, and is centralised in single projects with a coherent vision and broad user-interface guidelines that allow third-party apps to feel like they fit in.

Obviously this is a little limited by GNOME not really having a good mail app at the moment, but it looks like Stamp is getting really good. Plus, some of the ongoing work into further networking/PIM features in GNOME are really exciting - the upcoming local-first contacts portal and password autofill portal come to mind.

Mapping

Android has long had a bit of a maps problem. In general, the choice facing users has been to use some of the big nonfree mapping apps, like Google Maps or Magic Earth, or to forego important features like public transport routing. The open-source Android world is starting to catch up, with efforts such as an /e/OS maps app with transitous routing in alpha and work on integrating public transit into CoMaps ongoing, but GNOME Maps has public transport routing, not in alpha, right now, and has done for a while.

The Hard Parts

Hardware support

Fairphones tend to be among the better-supported of pmOS devices, but the Fairphone 6 is a new phone (roughly a year old), and the hardware support really isn't there yet. Speakers don't work, microphone doesn't work, neither does fingerprint, NFC, or the camera. I had been betting on mobile data, SMS and bluetooth working (they're documented as working on the pmOS wiki), but I've had no luck. The system UI recognises that I have a SIM card, but I never connect properly, and BlueTooth has similar issues. With BlueTooth headphones out, that leaves me with basically no routes to play audio, and without being able to authenticate text messages, I can't use Signal, even with Linux-first clients like Flare. Basically, I have a computer that can connect to WiFi and has no audio.

Dual-booting doesn't work particularly well either. You can install pmOS on an SD card and dual-boot it with /e/OS, but there's no ability to choose a boot partition at boot - you have to flash a new boot partition remotely each time.

Waydroid

Waydroid is a compatability layer that allows running Android apps on Linux systems. Theoretically, it should allow me to run the Android apps I need to run on my phone which don't have Linux clients - in particular, my Railcard, WhatsApp, my bank, etc.

I've had no luck in getting it working - upon opening the app or invoking it from a CLI, it just causes the UI to flicker. I know other users have managed to get it working on FP6 hardware, but even then they've had Internet access issues.

UI polish

GNOME is a great desktop system, but Phosh and GNOME apps in many places don't feel polished. GNOME Apps benefit a lot from buttons having a lot of reactivity. A button takes a different appearance when the mouse is hovered over it, and a different appearance again when pressed

On pmOS (Phosh + GNOME apps), this reactivity doesn't feel appreciable, meaning you don't get feedback on buttonpresses in a way that feels a bit choppy. I'm not sure pressing an app in the app list has any kind of tap feedback besides opening the app, for instance. Looking more closely, standard GTK UI buttons have feedback, but the visible press is less long on, for instance, back buttons, compared to Android.

Many other gestures and interactions feel unpolished in a way that I don't have the UI skills to reliably identify.

Copy-paste is also a bit of a mess. Different apps and system dialogues seem to have different avenues for copy-pasting. Some don't seem to be copy-pastable at all, and those differences are just across GNOME apps! In particular, I've found no way to paste a password into GNOME Online Accounts. Even just a paste button in the on-screen keyboard would provide a big improvement, but of course I'd really like to see a standard system text popup menu. I don't have the technical knowledge on Wayland and the XDG Desktop Portals to know what that looks like architecturally, but the current system isn't very good IMO.

Misc

Chatty isn't a very complete piece of software as it stands. Notably, it includes Matrix messaging features, but doesn't seem to be able to handle encrypted messaging at all. To an extent, non-Element Matrix clients lagging behind is pretty expected, but this feels like a pretty basic feature to not have working, especially for something installed out of the box.

The UI allows setting a pin, and actively encourages it with a numpad password box. However, setting the password to something with letters still has the login screen bring up a numpad by default, creating a number PIN with a fairly normal amount of digits for a phone PIN will be rejected by the OS, and upon switching from the numpad to the keyboard in the login screen, you can't go back without reentering the login screen.

Phosh gives you a popup asking about USB developer mode on the plugging in of any USB cable, even a dumb power cable.

Conclusion

With the mobile data, driver, and Waydroid issues unfortunately I don't think I can stick with postmarketOS for now. But I'm hopeful for the future! There's been a lot of movement on mainline drivers for FP6 recently (although from what I gather a lot of the work is vibecoded), and I think the big strides taken in the past ten years by the Linux desktop have proven that free software communities can create high-quality consumer software.

Generally, as time's gone on the feasibility of free Android ROMs has been more and more difficult. Google's regularly slashed the update cadence of their publicly available security patches, and whereas once upon a time AOSP would have several high-quality apps in them, now new app development is mostly kept as nonfree Google additions. It remains to be seen whether the new sideloading lockdowns will strike a big blow to the degoogled Android ecosystem (remember - even if our degoogled ROMs don't lock down on sideloading, the loss of accessibility could damage the health of projects like F-Droid and NewPipe). In any case, I hope you don't think me too hasty in seeing this as a bit of a sinking ship. Mobile Linux matters.

The success of free software initiatives have often depended on our ability to rise to crises. When Windows users railed against AI slop changes and the deprecation of Windows 10, we were able to step in with a high-quality operating system to offer. Now that European governments are realising the insanity of having most of their critical infrastructure rely on American companies, once again, Linux is ready to step in.

Sometimes we fail - when Discord users railed against overbearing age attestation requirements, Matrix was not well placed to step in - it currently lacks basic features like screen sharing with audio in calls, or server roles. Hence, nothing changed.

What about when the next crisis in the mobile ecosystem happens? When Android pushes a user-hostile update that the degoogled ROMs are unable to counter, will mobile Linux be able to step up?

I hope the answer is yes, and I'm gonna throw some money towards postmarketOS. In a year, I'll write a second blog post assessing whether the following areas have improved:

• Driver support (speakers, microphone, mobile data, BlueTooth, fingerprint, NFC, camera)
• Ease of dual booting pmOS and Android.
• Waydroid support
• UI look and feel
• Chatty polish