A review of postmarketOS on the Xiaomi Poco F1
I have recently had cause to start looking into mainline Linux phones which fall outside of the common range of grassroots phones like the PinePhone (which was my daily driver for the past year). The postmarketOS wiki is a great place to research candidate phones for this purpose, and the phone I landed on is the Xiaomi Poco F1, which I picked up on Amazon.nl (for ease of return in case it didn’t work out) for 270 Euro. Phones of this nature have a wide range of support from Linux distros like postmarketOS, from “not working at all” to “mostly working”. The essential features I require in a daily driver phone are (1) a working modem and telephony support, (2) mobile data, and (3) reasonably good performance and battery life; plus of course some sane baseline expectations like a working display and touchscreen driver.
The use of mainline Linux on a smartphone requires a certain degree of bullshit tolerance, and the main question is whether or not the bullshit exceeds your personal threshold. The Poco F1 indeed comes with some bullshit, but I’m pleased to report that it falls short of my threshold and represents a significant quality-of-life improvement over the PinePhone setup I have been using up to now.
The bullshit I have endured for the Poco F1 setup can be categorized into two parts: initial setup and ongoing problems. Of the two, the initial setup is by far the worst. These phones are designed to run Android first, rather than the mainline Linux first approach seen in devices like the PinePhone and Librem 5. This means that it’s back to dealing with things like Android recovery, fastboot, and so on, during the initial setup. The most severe pain point for Xiaomi phones is unlocking the bootloader.
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I have a much higher tolerance for “initial setup” bullshit than for ongoing problems bullshit, so this is a promising result for my needs. I have found that this device is ahead of the PinePhone that I had been using previously in almost all respects, and I have switched to it as my daily driver.