It took a while, but Can My Phone Run Linux? is finally available at many.tuxphones.com in its earliest release. This web app lets you know if you are one of the (likely many) lucky owners of a smartphone that supports some kind of Linux flavour, such as Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, Asteroid OS and Maemo Leste.

[2/2] As such feature might potentially take a while to be implemented, do you believe it will be an effectively useful resource also for inexperienced users or not really? RTs welcome! — TuxPhones (@tuxphones) June 28, 2019

How does it work?

The server-side back-end for this tool scrapes websites and wikis of known mobile Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS and Asteroid OS, for all supported devices (using Python scripts and cron jobs), formats and stores them as local .json files, which are then matched with the user query on the client side by the web app to search if the requested device is present in the list.

Pretty simple, right?

Planned features

As this is the very first release, the tool is still somewhat limited and there might be some leftover issues, which you are clearly more than welcome to report.

A current "wishlist" for future releases includes:

More detailed support info and description

Merging devices to show only a card for each one, with information about all supported distributions

Better usability for small displays

Support for SHR and webOS/LuneOS supported devices

A pre-release version used cats as placeholders for missing pictures.

So can your phone run Linux? The answer might be just a click away. And if it can, but you are still not sure if or how to proceed, our Quick Start Guide might give you some useful advice on what to do.

If you found this tool useful, you can support TuxPhones on Patreon and LiberaPay. TuxPhones does neither track its users, nor use any unneeded cookies. You can follow us on Twitter, Mastodon or join our friendly semi-official subreddit for more mobile-Linux news.