Currently they’re not close at all to being daily drivers (can speak from experience as I’ve flashed Ubuntu Touch onto a phone a few days ago), but their development has sped up a lot lately, so here’s to hoping for the best!

A bit late to the party here, but today I flashed Ubuntu Touch onto a Xiaomi Poco X3, and it’s… well, it’s rough.

All the base functionality seems to be there, calls should work (not sure because I didn’t test them extensively), sms works, location/gps works, nfc is supported, camera is… passable, battery life is certainly, and noticeably worse but that’s a given - when on standby, the battery goes down roughly 8% every 5 hours, so approx. 27% per day on standby.

While I’m really glad to see how much Linux phone development sped up, they are still nowhere near daily driver status - even the phones built with Linux support in mind are not faring well from what I’ve seen. Even then, I’m keeping this Poco X3 because Android’s days seem to be numbered.

Oh right, didn’t notice the post body. I gotta be honest, I haven’t seen a modern-ish phone with a square screen before 😅 Looks awesome!

Wow, what a sight! Surprised there was a Lineage ROM for this. What model is this?

True that. Possibly the reason the Redmi 9 Lineage ROM became discontinued, maybe it just wasn’t worth the effort.

aye, i’ve only played with mtk chipsets with lancelot (redmi 9) and one other phone i can’t remember (it was an oldie, released around 2016 - i think it was the redmi note 4?)

generally from what i remember (this was a good couple years ago) the mtk exploit lets you pretty painlessly unlock most mediatek xiaomi phones, and should still work just fine to this day - haven’t really seen anything change in the mediatek sphere lately. ironically in contrast to you i remember looking out specifically for mediatek devices because of this exploit (and purely because it skipped the waiting time, otherwise mtk phones should unlock just like qualcomm ones (though according to the xiaomi unlock wall of shame (linked in Kroko’s comment) phones with unisoc chipsets are not unlockable, but at the same time i have yet to see a unisoc xiaomi phone)).

i remember the particular tool i used but no matter what i try i can’t find it anywhere anymore. even then you can still find many exploit tools and guides on the web. after a quick search i found the ‘main’ mtkclient tool (this one), and guides on xiaomiui and droidwin (i recommend going with droidwin, since i trust it, and it uses the main tool i linked, while xiaomiui gives you a tool from a random sharepoint server, which is… uh… yknow)

i also unlock all xiaomi stuff through a virtual machine, and i recommend you do the same, since stuff around unlocking xiaomi phones is often very sketch (that, and also it usually leaves tons of junk on your pc you’ll never use again). virtualbox offers the simplest way to do this, though if you’re running something like QEMU/KVM everything should still be possible.

also i’ve noticed that modern xiaomi phones use qualcomm chipsets exclusively, so if you want to aim for mediatek phones, you’ll only be able to find low-performance ones. if you want an mtk xiaomi phone, i can recommend the redmi 9 - i’ve used it for 4 years before i switched, and it’s a very feature rich phone with decent performance (200k score on AnTuTu v8, while something more modern, like the Mi 10T Pro i’m currently using has a score of over 550k), currently runs for $40-80 on the used market (at least on my end), and is officially supported by LineageOS (nevermind, it’s officially discontinued, but it still receives updates from time to time, and you can still build the ROM yourself and install it)

Sweet! I better get to work while it’s still possible.

Searching through XDA gave me nothing - it seems the Redmi A3 is a pretty obscure phone in the Redmi line, which was honestly quite surprising. The Mi A3 overtaking it in the results wasn’t helping either.

In any case I couldn’t find any ROMs. mvikrant97 says in this post that you can’t even really unlock the A3 to begin with (at least as of July 2024 but I doubt anything as changed).

You could try using UAD to debloat a little bit, but I haven’t used it personally, so I’ll have to leave the research to you.

Knowing the state of modern webdev that is probably exactly what happens

You can go a step further and use breezewiki, which is basically a wrapper for Fandom that disables all the annoying crap.

On any fandom wiki you should be able to just change the url from (…)fandom.com/(…) to (…)antifandom.com/(…) and load that page through breezewiki.

I’ve been using both Open Camera and PhotonCamera for a while now, and these two are probably the best options. You can get them both on F-Droid.

Do be careful with Photon, though, as its still early in development and is very crash happy (not to mention its development is extremely slow, maybe even dead at this point?). It also has network permissions for… some reason, so make sure to disable those if possible.

Photon’s image processing also sucks up your battery power quite a lot - one time I’ve seen my battery drop 2% just from taking a single image (I run a Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro with LineageOS)

Photon also lacks A LOT in terms of customization. It’s also locked to taking pictures in HDR, unless you set the frame count to 1, in which case it will start taking pictures in RAW, which is even worse. It’s also impossible to switch the directory where the pictures are saved, and HDR pictures and RAW pictures are stored in entirely separate folders.

Despite all that, the pictures that come out of Photon are definitely a grade above those I take with Open Camera, though I still use OC when I get fed up with Photon every now and then. And when set up right, the pictures taken with OC can be just as good.