Furilabs Linux Phone | slacker news

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.

> 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.