The smartphone landscape is essentially a duopoly these days, with Google's Android and Apple's iOS completely dominating the market. And while we all know that Android is a Linux-based operating system, it's quite a bit different than your typical Linux distro, and there's always been some curiosity about running Linux on a phone. Efforts like Ubuntu Touch or Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile show there's interest in this idea, but it hasn't really taken off yet.

However, one company is pushing forward with this concept, and has been for a while. Finland-based Jolla has been developing a Linux distro called Sailfish OS since 2013, and making phones that ship with this experience, too. One of its most recent efforts is the Jolla C2 Community Phone, and I recently got my hands on one to see what it's like.

It's a phone

And Sailfish OS isn't that bad

I have a lot of thoughts about Sailfish OS and I will likely dive into them more at a later time, but right off the bat, this platform is a very solid foundation for a phone. For something as obscure as it is, Sailfish OS offers all the things you'd expect, from phone calls and texting to its own app store, along with the ability to add your own app stores or sideload apps. It has a fairly typical lock screen, home screen, and features from Wi-Fi hotspots to battery saving, and even an interesting theming feature.

But it's all done with a very unique twist that makes Sailfish OS feel very different from its competitors. Relearning all the design paradigms was a little challenging at first, but it is refreshing to see a device that shows every device doesn't have to abide by the same rules. You can have a perfectly functional UI that's still radically different from anything else out there. A big example is the home screen, which doesn't actually contain your app icons. Instead, it's a task view for your open apps, showing a preview of their content.

As a Linux distro, what makes Sailfish OS unique on phones is that, well, it's Linux, so you get a terminal out of the box, and it actually does a lot of the things you'd expect. The package manager backend is RPM, though you don't get access to the usual repositories out of the box, meaning a little more setup is required to get the apps you may be used to on desktops. Even if you try to sideload RPM files (which is the standard format for apps), the system may not be able to resolve their dependencies. Still, it's cool that this is possible at all and I want to explore more of what can be done with Sailfish OS.

I'm not sure if this is the result of the system behaving like a desktop, but one thing I did like is if I open a YouTube video in the native browser, I can put the phone to sleep or switch to another app and have the video keep playing in the background.

Android app support helps

I can do almost anything

As interesting as Sailfish OS is, it's a very small platform in terms of community support, so a lot of things aren't going to be available. I was able to do a bit more than I expected with native apps, from browsing Reddit (with the Quickddit app) to sending messages on Discord (using Sailcord), and there's even a Sailfish version of AIDA64 for system information. But there's too much missing, so if you want to use a Jolla phone like a typical phone, Android app support is basically required.

Jolla created a proprietary compatibility layer for Android apps using a Linux container (LXC), allowing you to run a wide range of Android apps on this device. The approach is somewhat similar to running Waydroid on a Linux PC, and that's the experience I got for the most part.

The majority of my apps worked on Sailfish OS, and they run fairly smoothly. That includes Beeper, Mozilla Thunderbird for email (there's a built-in native email client but it has limited account support), the Vivaldi web browser, and even my bank's app or my government's digital ID app.

However, I also found a lot of limitations. Any Google apps I tried, including Google Home, Maps, and YouTube, crashed instantly on boot, despite the phone including microG services. Microsoft's Authenticator app constantly failed to recover my accounts from a backup, PayPal refused to launch, and the Portuguese payment service MB Way also refused to work.

A lot of these things are specific enough that maybe you don't need them for your day-to-day use, but for me, this is enough to make it impossible for this phone to truly be a daily driver. It doesn't help that even the native Pure Maps app doesn't seem to be able to pinpoint my location in a timely manner, making it impossible to use the phone for navigation.

It's a nice piece of hardware

Though far from the high end

Aside from the software experience, the Jolla C2 Community Phone is a pretty device in its own right. Jolla is a software company, so the hardware is actually made by a third-party company called Reeder, based in Turkey. This model seems to be largely based on the Reeder S19, and when you use an Android app, the device identifier used in those apps actually shows that same name.

The hardware feels quite nice, despite being a low-end phone. The back is plastic, but it has a very pleasant soft touch feel to it, and the frame appears to be made of metal, so it feels sturdy in the hand. The triple camera setup isn't great, but it works, and while the display is only 720p resolution, it honestly feels perfectly fine to use. The Sailfish OS UI is still very visually appealing on this kind of screen.

It's worth noting that, prior to the outrageous price increases for memory, this was a phone that cost less than €300, and even now, it's €349, so you can't set your expectations too high.

As someone who primarily uses their phone to do things, the biggest shortcoming honestly seems to be the chipset. The Unisoc processor has six efficiency cores and two performance cores, and none of it is particularly great. Everything works fine, and the phone handles background tasks surprisingly well, but things can feel a little slow at times, with Android apps specifically feeling stuttery when scrolling.

A desktop UI would be great

There's no external display support

Since we're talking about a Linux phone, it would be especially great if the team actually tried to make it a sort of all-in-one device that can also be used as a desktop. Shipping a desktop UI of some kind would be great so you can plug the phone into a monitor and turn it into a computer.

Granted, you probably wouldn't want that on this hardware due to the middling performance, but I hope the option is at least under consideration for the newer, more powerful Jolla Phone. The Jolla C2 unfortunately seems to have no output from the USB-C port, so even screen mirroring isn't supported.

What else can you do with a Linux phone?

I've only had the Jolla C2 for a few days but I'm trying to make it my daily driver for a bit to see what it's like, but I'm most curious to see what capabilities I might be able to get by having a proper Linux phone available. With a terminal built right in, I should be able to add repositories and install other apps, so it'll be interesting to see what can be done. My next order of business will be figuring out how to install common desktop packages like ffmpeg or Distrobox on this device.