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Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

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Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#171

Post by agentdrtran »

rocky1138 wrote: post #163
maheart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

If you haven't already, please consider the Pyra. It's a full Linux desktop in a phone-ish format and supports SIM cards for voice calling and text. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

You suggest using that monstrosity as a phone?

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#172

Post by djsumdog »

rocky1138 wrote: post #163
maheart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

If you haven't already, please consider the Pyra. It's a full Linux desktop in a phone-ish format and supports SIM cards for voice calling and text. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

Interesting. The photo looks kinda bulky, but it's pretty zoomed in. I guess it's more DS sized?

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#173

Post by _ea1k »

bartread wrote: post #74
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

I was at Phonegap Europe 2013 and there was a big noise about Firefox OS (then still known as Boot to Gecko) there. It looked cool but it was always targeted at low-end, low-cost devices. The problem with that, from my perspective as a developer, is that I don't want to develop apps for low-end devices because it's an enormous pain in the ass. The lack of horsepower and features means you're pretty much required to c…

Yeah, that sums up a lot of their problems really well. They were basically attacking a market segment that wouldn't exist by the time that they had completed products on the market.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#174

Post by ioddly »

jbb555 wrote: post #34
padraic7a wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu Touch is still going. It's up to it's 13th release now and I don't think it's a failed project. However I do think it's something that isn't yet ready for primetime, and it's going to be more a year or more before it is. In the meantime they are trying to iron out bugs, improve features and get more developer attention for it. Recently they've added support for React Native: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/rea…

I didn't know that ubuntu had a phone. I wondered if it could be installed on my own phone? Doessn't seem to mention that on their website. Oh well perhaps I'll buy one "Note — all our devices are currently sold out" Ok well I guess I'll stick to android then...

I just looked at the Jolla devices as well and they are also out of stock. I imagine it's probably harder to coordinate selling these devices in small batches; I wish there was at least some kind of availability list I could sign up for.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#175

Post by djsumdog »

maheart wrote: post #127
skrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

>> Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Android is just the Linux kernel on the phone -- that's the issue I have with it. It comes with none of the other stuff that makes GNU/Linux great: philosophically/socially it's different, but on a technical level it's missing rest of the GNU/Linux stack (e.g. package management, and the plethora of developer tools -- including languages and libra…

The lack of package management and standard kernel/modules is a huge issue from Android. It keeps it from being truly open. I wrote a post about this a while ago:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

The TL;DR, Android needs to be fixed so ASOP can be installed on any phone, just like Linux/Windows. The current state is bizarre for what's essentially now a general purpose operating system.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#176

Post by bobajeff »

freehunter wrote: post #165
bobajeff wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd have to be using the Batman method of deduction to reach such a conclusion based off my comment.

Let's follow the conversation: "Gecko is being abandoned." "But their replacement, Servo, isn't ready yet!" "That's true, but WebKit is and they already have a WebKit-based browser." If you don't want your comment considered in the context of the conversation you replied to, you can make a top-level comment instead.

That's not really word for word. But I can see what you must have been thinking now.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#177

Post by syrrim »

lloeki wrote: post #57
teekert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. And FF is not FF-OS.

> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious…

Open your terminal, type ':(){ :|:& };:'. Notice how the whole OS becomes unresponsive.

There is a very simple solution to both these problems, which most people employ to great effect: just don't do that.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#178

Post by djsumdog »

vegabook wrote: post #126
skrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

Unfortunately it's also JVM [edit: Java] on the phone.

It's a subset of Java, with a totally different compiler, JIT, etc. Newer versions don't even use Dalvic, but compile/cache the bytecode into ELF/machine code.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#179

Post by jahbrewski »

agentdrtran wrote: post #171
rocky1138 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't already, please consider the Pyra. It's a full Linux desktop in a phone-ish format and supports SIM cards for voice calling and text. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

You suggest using that monstrosity as a phone ?

It looks ..worse than the phone I used 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_enV2_(VX9100).

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#180

Post by vegabook »

_ea1k wrote: post #170
vegabook wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Ellison doesn't seem to agree with your "nothing to do with [...] JVM" assertion, to the tune of a 9.3 billion USD lawsuit, and indeed Google itself is developing Fuchsia with no java stack at all in it. Moreover, it's not Linux if you have to use a Java API to do anything useful.

The lawsuit was not about the VM.

Look. The gist of the comment is that Android forces you to use java, or at the very least, a java API. You can dance around semantics as much as you like, but it will not change the fact that, unlike Linux, Android is intricately interlinked with java.
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