RidgeOS: Bringing My Old Phone Back to Life

I got a new phone a while ago, so my OnePlus 8T moved to the desk and slowly became one of those devices that is still useful in theory, but never actually used.

It was discontinued, out of support, and no longer something I wanted to run as my main Android phone. But the hardware was still good. The screen was fine, the SoC was fast enough, and it had plenty of interesting parts inside: modem, cameras, sensors, audio, display output, and all the usual phone chaos.

So I decided to bring it back to life as a Linux phone.

I first looked at postmarketOS. It is a great project, and getting a phone to boot a real Linux system is already impressive. But for the OnePlus 8T, booting was only the start. I wanted the everyday things to work too: web browsing, video, music, mobile data, external display, and audio routing.

That meant going deeper than a postmarketOS install. I needed more control over the kernel patches, userspace, and device-specific decisions. So I started a small distro called RidgeOS.

RidgeOS is not meant to be a big general-purpose distribution. At least not right now. It is a focused project for making this OnePlus 8T useful again, with enough control over the full stack to fix the issues that usually get hidden under Android.

The main goal is simple:

Get the OnePlus 8T to a state where I can use it for most things I normally do on a smartphone, so I depend less on my daily driver.

That means:

There is also a side goal. I had a mini PC around too, so RidgeOS also has an amd64 target. That gives me a more comfortable test platform and keeps the project from being completely tied to one phone.

This series will document the work as it goes. Some parts are already known to be hard and painful.

Upcoming: