said deloptes via tde-users: | dep via tde-users wrote: | > Yes. I have a ThinkPad running Linux, and I want to make a phone call. | > So I repartition the drive to make a place for a Linux-based telephone | > operating system for amd64 and -- oh, wait, there isn't one -- after | > which I can make my phone call. | | Now I understand. You want a program that can utilize the built in modem | and be able to make a phone call. | I have a Pinephone with KDE5 and it can do phone calls via the sim card, | but it is so heavy for the hardware and buggy in the handling that I | left it aside and do not know which software exactly does the work. You | may have a look there.
Yeah, straight-up Linux distributions for phones have always been kind of bad, and for some reason those who make phones for Linux seem bad at it, too.
(And I'm all for conservation, but if that's your goal, find something other than tin cans and plastic to put food in, because the telephonic burden on the environment is slim. If FairPhone would choose saving the world or building a great Linux phone, one or the other, they might do better. Pinephone at least has a good price for essentially the same phone, but it has a website suggesting that the company hasn't advanced beyond beta. Weird. Though my favorite is the Liberty phone, an entirely unremarkable low-end phone that runs Linux for the everyday low price of $2200!)
I flashed Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus tablet a few years ago and was totally underwhelmed. They listed a zillion applications, but they were all webapps and you can make those yourself in about two minutes: take an icon, list a browser with a website, and you're done. A couple of years ago Mint made big noise about an application that would do that, as if you couldn't do it already by following the instructions in the sentence above. It's like all the "Debian-based" distributions that take Debian, rearrange the hierarchy just enough to make them incompatible with actual Debian, cook up some unkillable little update announcer, and call themselves a distribution.
When I got the ThinkPad, the idea of wireless everywhere was a thing, as was ExpressCard (for those of us who didn't learn our lesson with PCMCIA). And lord, if I didn't fall for it! All of it.
Though there are apparently phones that run on Tizen, which has an Enlightenment-based frontend. I think that's where E gets most of its money, so it would be nice to see it actually working well, all of it.
But no, I'll stick with my GrapheneOS on Pixel and spend my money fixing up an ancient ThinkPad, and thereby keeping alive as much hardware as Fairphone sells in a month.