Like what the person you replied to said. Sandboxing on Linux phones is incredibly weak outside of non-Flatpak Chromium browsers. And even Flatpak itself is a pretty weak sandbox compared to iOS/Android sandboxing. Part of this stems from Android and iOS being developed as sandbox-first OSes, so this could be said for any desktop operating system really aside from ChromeOS.

Also sure you could avoid crapware from Meta, Google and the likes but you will still could be exposed to nefarious programs via things like supply chain attacks (i.e. npm), or the developer turning coat or not realizing their app has an exploit, etc.

Linux also lacks a thorough permissions system unlike iOS/Android and the even more granular GrapheneOS.

Linux phones lack verified boot meaning persistent malware is trivial on linux devices. There is no MTE/MIE on Linux phones and even Google themselves say like 70% of malware spawns from memory exploits[1].

Also linux only really has block level encryption, not file based encryption like iOS/Android. It would be trivial for LEO to access your device unless it was totally powered off and then the only protection is LUKS. Or really even if you lose your phone and someone was so inclined to they could just extract all the data if it was powered on but on the “lock screen,” as most if not all desktop (and I’d imagine linux phone) environments do not actually do any encryption or anything when the system is locked, it’s just a cosmetic lock for all intents and purposes.

It would maybe be possible to somewhat mitigate that with cryptomator or somehow using fscrypt since that’s what Android uses but I dont know

Also even for basic things like clipboard protection, even with Wayland there are ways around it so that an app can read anything from the clipboard (not usually done for nefarious means in my experience, but it’s possible — see an app like Vicinae’s clipboard history and clipboard-centric features running on Wayland).

There’s more but this is like a short overview.

This doesn’t even get into people preferring Firefox on Linux which is light years behind Chromium based browsers in terms of security.

While it’s not a huge issue on desktop depending on how you view it, I would imagine phones see way more of people’s private data than their computers do and so I think it’s more beneficial to have higher security here than give that up for Linux.

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[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2024/10/safer-with-google-ad...