Hello dear community,
I want to get a FairPhone for myself and install Artix Linux on it. Is it possible to install the operating system from the SD card similar to the Raspberry Pi?
However, I still need some Android apps. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that an Android emulator will not run well on this hardware.
Can you give me some advice?
Thank you.
Welcome to the Forum,
running Linux distributions on a Fairphone (or any other smartphone) is not really supported. There are exceptions (i.e. PinePhone) or you can look at postmarketOS if you want to give it a try. But afaik this is more for developers and not for end-users.
Installing a custom operating system on your phone is a little bit different than for a Raspberry Pi.
First you need to unlock your phone (Fairphones support that 
)
Second you need to boot into a recovery image to flash your new system to the internal storage. I have not seen a phone that does support booting directly from an SD card.
Again if you want to try this look at the postmarketOS wiki.
Supported in your mentioned PinePhone ;-)
Right, Good catch!
or at Ubuntu Touch … https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
I bet there are more exceptions, but all i have seen is (sadly) quite niche compared to Android.
I would like to see a ‘classic’ linux distribution (optimized for phones obviously) as a working alternative.
not possible. It’s a phone and booting works quite differently than on a “normal” computer, x86 or arm. Even if it were possible to boot / install from sd card, you wouldn’t be able to install artix, simply because there is no build of artix that would work on the fairphone chipset. There isn’t even an arm or raspberry build of artix. So unless you’re willing to invest a lot of time into patching and cross-compiling everything yourself, this is not gonna happen.
If you want to run linux on your fairphone and still use android apps your best (and afaik only fully supported) option would be the FP4 with ubuntu touch and waydroid. This should actually work quite decently. But be aware that waydroid uses an older android version (currently lineage android 11) and has always been behind quite a few versions.
I’ve always had a question: since Linux already exists, why do we need Android?
Technically Android is just a virtual machine on top of Linux. So the actual OS Android is running on is Linux.
The reason for this design is to be platform independent. Any phone manufacturer can build their phone with the hardware they want and only need to supply the Linux drivers and make sure the Android virtual machine runs on their platform. Everything else is then handled by the Android VM and libraries. That’s way easier than porting and cross-compiling all the possible libraries or apps to each possible platform.
In short, if you want one common app store with apps that run on all possible phone platforms, you need a common abstraction layer / virtual machine interface on top of the actual, physical hardware. That’s what Android provides, a common virtual machine with a virtual OS running on it.
Fun fact, ARM as a base is so popular, because their processors were among the first to include dedicated byte-code execution units that are capable to directly interpret and run (java / android) byte-code on hardware. This makes it way more efficient than compiling byte-code just-in-time into machine code.
