101–110 of 121 posts
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I challenge you to name me one Android device that is officially supported for 4 or more years. ;) iPhone 4 is 8 years old so not sure I see your point.
The Nvidia Shield TV is pretty close. It came out May 2015 and is still being supported (most recent update came out in September).
When I buy a laptop I install whatever is the latest version of Ubuntu on it and am done. When I buy an access point I install whatever is the latest version of OpenWrt on it and am done. I've tried to do the same thing with phones using LineageOS but it's hopeless. Devices are often half broken and are never guaranteed to continue being supported because of this kernel mess. It seems there's slow progress being made…
When I buy a laptop I install whatever is the latest version of Ubuntu on it and am done. When I buy an access point I install whatever is the latest version of OpenWrt on it and am done. I've tried to do the same thing with phones using LineageOS but it's hopeless. Devices are often half broken and are never guaranteed to continue being supported because of this kernel mess. It seems there's slow progress being made…
Side-hijack: Your fav OpenWRT router ?
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This. I managed to build recent Linux on a Pentium MMX Mobile (IIRC) laptop from 1998. A cell phone from 5 years ago can't handle a modern operating system, but a 1998 laptop can run Xorg just fine.
Just the other day I installed the latest lineageos on my original moto G, I think thats from 2013. And it works great. Edit: actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.
It's not. You're stuck with an Android that's 2 versions behind current and are still using the original kernel version that shipped with the device.
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Android Inc should probably have gone with a micro kernel, instead of going for Linux' monolithic approach. Would have made things much easier to manage in regard to separation of concerns.
Wouldn't really help -- the biggest result would be that vendors would have less of a reason to release things under the GPL.
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There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities. Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports AOSP (Sony does too, with some caveats) and install plain AOSP. It's not perfect as you need a bit of infrastructure to compile it yourself and keep OTA updates. But it's the most practical secure and privacy-respecting option, I think.
As far as I know those have the exact same issues with their kernels. The problem isn't the Android side of things, that's workable with Android One phones too. The problem is what is described in the article, the kernels at best get some patches but are never upgraded to new versions. Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially.
In older times, kernel patches for exotic hardware often tied the user to a specific version - of course a very stale one... Let's not go there again !
When I buy a laptop I install whatever is the latest version of Ubuntu on it and am done. When I buy an access point I install whatever is the latest version of OpenWrt on it and am done. I've tried to do the same thing with phones using LineageOS but it's hopeless. Devices are often half broken and are never guaranteed to continue being supported because of this kernel mess. It seems there's slow progress being made…
Side-hijack: Your fav OpenWRT router ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I managed to build recent Linux on a Pentium MMX Mobile (IIRC) laptop from 1998. A cell phone from 5 years ago can't handle a modern operating system, but a 1998 laptop can run Xorg just fine.
The funny thing is the SoC in these smartphones can totally run Linux & Darwin, but the driver support for the peripherals is shovelware. Vendors do the bare minimum to suppprt the hardware, and you get a mess. Its frankly shocking that the Allwinner A10/A20/A64 (which can run Win10!) /H3/H5/H6 has nearly complete mainline kernel support, whereas nearly any of the smartphones made since 2008 can't boot mainline Linux…
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There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities. Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports AOSP (Sony does too, with some caveats) and install plain AOSP. It's not perfect as you need a bit of infrastructure to compile it yourself and keep OTA updates. But it's the most practical secure and privacy-respecting option, I think.
The shoddy build quality, plus lack of microSD & heaphone jack means I will never buy a Pixel or other Google branded hardware. My friends seem to get a year or so before the SoC desolders from the motherboard, causing the device to bootloop, or the battery fails, or one of a million other things. Among us, there are a few dozen Pixels that are unusable due to their hardware defects. Meanwhile, both of my old Galaxy…
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Just the other day I installed the latest lineageos on my original moto G, I think thats from 2013. And it works great. Edit: actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.
>actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists. It's not. You're stuck with an Android that's 2 versions behind current and are still using the original kernel version that shipped with the device.