Do phones and tablets work on Linux?

Android is the easy one. Plug the phone in, unlock it, and pick the file transfer option that appears on the phone's screen. It then opens in your file manager like a USB stick, and you drag photos, music and documents in either direction. The protocol behind this is called MTP, and Linux handles it through a library called libmtp, which was built for exactly this and covers phones and media players broadly. Android itself includes the other half of the conversation. You do not install anything.

iPhones and iPads are more limited, and it is worth being clear about what you lose. Photo and video import works well, and your Linux photo app will offer to bring images across when you plug the phone in and tap Trust. Beyond that, the tooling on Linux is a project called libimobiledevice, which can read device information, install apps, take backups and mount the filesystem. It has been kept compatible with iOS releases going back years. What it explicitly cannot do is sync music. The project states plainly that music synchronisation with newer devices is not supported.

So if your routine is plugging an iPhone into a PC and managing it through iTunes, that routine does not survive the move. What replaces it for most people is doing it on the phone itself and through iCloud in a browser. Backups go to iCloud or to a Mac, photos come across by cable or through iCloud Photos in Firefox, and music is streamed rather than loaded.

Tablets behave like their phones. An Android tablet is a folder, an iPad is photos and not much else. Tethering your phone's mobile data over USB or Bluetooth works on both platforms and normally needs no setup beyond turning it on in the phone's settings.