Furilabs Linux Phone

I want to like it... But, I've been bitten too many times by expensive Linux phones (Oh Nokia N900, how I wanted to love you. but you couldn't even make phone calls without threatening to crash).

It's a little weird that there are very few details on this thing. Notably, one of my #1 concerns when looking for a new phone today is a good camera. And all I can find on the camera is "it's 50MP!!! " But how do actual, non-photoshopped pictures look? Does it do okay in low-light? Does it support any sort of optical zoom?

Their website is currently as slow as a frozen snail (which, if they can't run a basic web server, leads to a lot of doubt they can maintain a long-term Linux distro). So I couldn't click around much, but I didn't find anything really informative.

I tried looking at YouTube videos and only found some weird official videos of a person's hand putting the phone in a sink. Like... Yes, it has been expected for the last 8ish years that my phone will be waterproof, that's not an amazing achievement.

It also seems to be "weird" Linux, like Maemo was for the N900. I don't want weird, custom-built stuff that will be forgotten about in 12 months. Just give me a standard Debain/Fedora/Whatever and an unlocked bootloader to reinstall with what I want.

IMHO they should really look at what Valve did with the steamdeck and SteamOS, It's a custom Linux that works well, but, it's also standard hardware with an open bootloader. There are dozens of SteamOS alternatives.

> It also seems to be "weird" Linux, like Maemo was for the N900. I don't want weird, custom-built stuff that will be forgotten about in 12 months. Just give me a standard Debain/Fedora/Whatever and an unlocked bootloader to reinstall with what I want.

I wouldn't say it's a "weird Linux as it's mostly Debian and it's fully rebuildable by the user from the open source scripts[1]. I would likewise love a phone that was just mainline Fedora, but given many of the current challenges around ARM devices with linux, I fully understand why a "custom-built" OS is needed. As long as it's as light-weight as possible and is open source/rebuildable by the user, I think it's a good compromise given the realities around the platform.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840036

I agree with you on some points - I do know a lot of people (myself included) have been bitten in the past many years by Linux phones that didn't do what they really claimed they'd eventually do. There's not much I can do there other than continue to work on it and make it the best possible Linux phone. It will speak for itself.

I also completely agree that we should have a camera showcase. We've been talking about the idea of letting customers upload their shots to some sort of gallery so people can see how the real world looks through the camera's lens. What I can tell you though is that pictures look pretty darn good, and low light is great owing to the f/1.57 aperture. No optical zoom for this model unfortunately.

I'm not sure the website being slow speaks to our capability of maintaining a distro, especially when you consider these two things are done by different people. Sure, I'd love to work on the website and make it faster. But I'm busy working on the actual phone.

The video situation will improve as reviews come in. As for just giving you an unlocked bootloader and regular Linux... sure, I can do that. But you're not going to have audio, hardware acceleration, camera, etc. postmarketOS is a good example of this - despite years of tireless work, it's just really hard to get a regular distro working on a phone without leveraging Android drivers, at least for now.

The website (which is faster now) links to a review with a nice photo showcase, https://blog-d.luigi311.com/furilabs-flx1/. Not perfect, but better than I thought!

To be fair (insert meme here)

Maemo was "mostly Debian" as well, it was one of the big selling points. Except Maemo was quickly abandoned by Nokia and left unmaintained. To further complicate matters Maemo required arcane tools to build it and install it to a device. Custom community kernels quickly became standard for enabling basic functionality which Nokia should have provided, but, didn't. However, the custom kernels were also frequently left unpatched and abandoned because they were being built and maintained by random internet users who found other hobbies.

I think the idea is awesome and I am excited if not skeptical. I hope Furi manages to build a healthy community around this. And doesn't go the path of so many previous Linux phones.

> And all I can find on the camera is "it's 50MP!!! " But how do actual, non-photoshopped pictures look?

It's probably all they know about the camera. Not even Apple make their own cameras. It's always someone else's (customized)product. If they're outsourcing hardware, they might not even know the customer code assigned to the contracted OEM.

> I don't want weird, custom-built stuff that will be forgotten about in 12 months

Then none of hardware and many of software features will work. There are no in-box standard implementations for e.g. phone call in GNU/Linux, so it'll have to be supplied in the form of a custom preconfigured distro with bunch of free preinstalled apps.

The fact that product necessitating free preinstalled apps to function leads to needs to supply OS as flavors of your own weird unsupported distro, like N900-specifix Maemo or Steam Deck OLED-specific SteamOS images.

You aren't going to like being instructed how to install and patch a SIP softphone just to make calls on North American carriers with vague hints for Canadian specifics. It's a phone, it'll be lame if it doesn't make calls out of the box. And there comes the 3 years old $DISTRO-$HWREV-$VERSION.img that instantly shows antenna bars right on the setup screen.

Actually I think it's unfair to call Maemo a weird unsupported thing. It didn't seem that far from bone stock desktop Linux.

n900 was perfectly reliable, yours had a problem. And Maemo was a wonderful interface for mobile stuff. Clean, functional, tweakable. Regret it every day, facing shitty Android. I dream for a LTE n900 with a larger screen, leaving the rest unchanged : unbreakable resistive screen, mecanical keyboard, fantastic stereo speakers, etc.

Maemo was indeed fantastic!

SFOS is somewhat getting where Harmattan was before Nokia imploded. It's already better in some ways.

>postmarketOS is a good example of this - despite years of tireless work, it's just really hard to get a regular distro working on a phone without leveraging Android drivers, at least for now.

Does this mean you are not working on mainlining this device? I'll take the slow and steady pmOS approach over sketchy Android shims. That's what ruined the Planet Computers Gemini PDA for me. A temporary solution is often surprisingly permanent.

We are not actively working on it, although some work has been done in that direction as a weekend project. It's not something we are ruling out, but we want to focus on delivering something that works, and works well. If the product does well enough to be able to finance continued effort in that direction, and there aren't any "massive" issues to work on before that, then... I guess it might just happen. Hard to tell right now.