Hello all,
Ive helped crowd fund this hopefully awesome new Linux phone. Ive been using linux since late 2010.
A few questions that I have about this phone…
1- what file extension will the apps be for it, will it be .deb files?
2- Any companies jumping aboard for making phone cases for it?
3- what type of connection type/size will it have for the power plug at the base of the phone for power/ connection point to USB plug into a PC?
4- Will this phone have its own mobile app store or can we install apps by the Phone’s GUI or CLI?
5- What software options will be available for installing 3rd party VPNs?
6 What file type will this phone support for the SD cards? Ext2/3/4, NTFS ect?
A few apps/programs that I would like to see compatible with this phone are…
Yubikey
NFC support
Pronton mail and ProtonVPN
Syncthing (no 3rd party storage sync)
These are the answers which I know:
USB-C.
Since the OS we get will basically be ordinary desktop Linux but with a different frontend more suited for mobile devices (KDE has Plasma Mobile, I forget what Gnome’s offering was called), you can stick whatever VPN software on here that you have on your normal desktop machine. Note that it’s ARM and not x86, so if your VPN vendor supplies binary blobs only (as opposed to a configuration script for something like OpenVPN, which will have a native version), you’ll need to make sure that it’s compatible.
Everything that ordinary desktop Linux supports - so all of those, plus the obligatory FAT32, possibly even more esoteric things like ZFS.
It seems though Protonmail have finally made their IMAP/SMTP bridge, which means that you should be able to use it just fine with Thunderbird on the phone. If nothing else, Protonmail will work just fine through their website interface. ProtonVPN - not sure about how that works, but I imagine that they’d give you details to configure OpenVPN on your desktop machine, which will work fine here.
NFC: that would require either hardware built into the phone (it’s not in the specs, I’d like it, but I don’t know how feasible that would be) or if all else fails, you’d be able to plug an external NFC adapter into the USB port on the phone (which would be horribly clunky).