Is it possible to run Android apps in the Linux phone? If I could run WhatsApp and my bank’s app (which I need to in order to get into my account) I would definitely switch.
Will Linux phones stay around this time?
231–240 of 491 posts
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#232Openmoko failed for so much more than financial reasons. It's been a while since I've thought of that fiasco, but my memories: * The leadership was terrible. They had no clue what it took to make a mass market product. They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically. * The hardware was buggy. There was one issue that if you let the battery dr…
> They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically. No, not really. They had an exact opposite problem - they made several iterations of the default operating system, starting almost from scratch at each iteration, which burned quite a lot of energy and willpower of the community, which in turn focused their efforts on alternative distros like…
Whoops, good call, that should have been 5kBps. GPRS had something like 85kbps theoretical maximum transfer speed, but the fastest I ever got anything to transfer over cellular was about 5kBps. Still, even in that era, that was absurdly slow, and unusable for anything web-related.
> SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro
I might have been thinking of a different distribution. There was one that brought in all of the GTK, Qtopia, and Enlightenment libraries, so you could run pretty much anything that could compile on the Freerunner, but it was quite slow and consumed most of my SD card (which at the time was probably only something like 1GB).
I guess if you were a hard-core hardware and systems hacker, the OpenMoko was an acceptable platform. For anyone else, it was a terrible product and the company that made it was obviously doomed to fail.
Maybe if it had come out at least 2 years earlier, it might have had some hope of carving out a sustainable niche, but by the time it did come out, the expectations set by iPhone and Android made it impossible to find a product-market fit, even among open source lovers like me. Maemo, while if memory serves not fully open sourced, was far closer to something sustainable, but then Nokia voluntarily imploded :-(
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#233All I want is a proper modular phone that can run linux.
I dont need camera, happy with a fat phone for battery space, etc.
please let it happen one day.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#234I'd be shocked if it took off. The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design, and this is far more important for people on mobile than desktop.
Two things: 1) The GNU utilities have pretty good CLI UI design and there are plenty of us who are perfectly happy with just that and a decent WM like FVWM even on a phone 2) It's not like closed mobile stuff has a great UI either. My favorite example is Apple's camera app. Did you know you can do manual focus with it? It's absolutely impossible to discover but I think it involves a "reverse three finger pinch." I've…
I mean, you say "plenty", but it's going to be only a fraction of the number of people who are perfectly happy with that sort of thing on the desktop, which already isn't very many people (even if you assumed all *nix users sans Macheads were like this, which they're not).
And while you're right to say that mobile UI design can be bad, is the solution to that really throwing out mobile UI as a concept altogether in favor of ... a window manager designed for a mouse and ketboard, running text terminals on a tiny touchscreen?
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#235I'd be shocked if it took off. The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design, and this is far more important for people on mobile than desktop.
It depends on what you mean by design.
Modern proprietary OS (mobile and desktop) certainly have more polish, aesthetic taste and cohesion - that last one being the most valuable when compared to much of FOSS. But in terms of usability I'm not convinced they are any better unless we are going back a good 20 years. They have improved looks at the cost of performance and significant ambiguity and thus mental overhead in learning and general operation.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same argument applies to Windows vs Linux. Same story. Synergy opens amazing smartphone hardware to Linux — DCI-P3 color space, high refresh rates, variable refresh rates. Sandboxing, user privacy features, we need this on desktop too.
No? You can't fork Windows.
"Just use existing Windows kernel and drivers, there are a lot of Open Source applications" etc etc.
There is nothing special about Linux distribution, same could be done on top of NT kernel. But it is not. React OS reimplements kernel and userspace, in theory userspace could be used on top of Windows. There are a lot of Windows users yet no such thing.
Somehow Linux experience is much richer and safe. Xmonad and pacman.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#237I enjoy the Pinephone, but it certainly has its issues. I’d kill for better performance; it’s very close to usability. I also have some issues with the hardware (it seems my battery has stopped working entirely, recently.) On the other hand, there is one confounding software issue that I think makes it the hardest as a full replacement for a modern smartphone: push notifications. An equivalent for APNS or FCM that al…
Mozilla has mobile style push notifications for Firefox and you can just leave eg a mail client running in the background using the IMAP IDLE feature for mail. As long as you restrict that sort of thing to just a couple apps it's fine.
More than push notifications the WiFi firmware needs a feature to whitelist IPs that can wake the phone from sleep so you get instant notifications from services.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps there are too many designers? Or overconfident programmers who think they can do the design work?
I'd say it's neither. Demoscene is a good example of when designers and programmers were working well together. Deviantart was a huge platform where people would share art and designs/skins. To some extent that still exists for iOS views. I think one thing that's different about the deviantart model was that back then apps used to have skinning interfaces. And then designers could focus on just skinning. You could ar…
This totally proves the point above of programmers not having the first clue about UX design, why it's hard and makes a the whole difference. It is everything BUT "skinning".
It's about the users and their ability to understand how to work with your software to address their needs and expectations... not about your code, the designer or the manager. Those people are the product, NOT the user.
If I had a dollar for every programmer and manager that thought they knew better and stubbornly cooked up a crappy MVP nobody wanted, I would be able to fund your OSS.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without Linux Android wouldn't have gotten off the ground.
Without Google, Android would never have gotten off the ground. Imagine an alternate history where Google bought QNX instead of Android Inc. back in 2005, do you think Android would still dominate the Mobile OS market today, or do you think Google QNX would be the dominant mobile OS.
What with QnX being a much better OS for mobile than Linux it would have been a smart move, but because Android used FOSS as a base rather than to pay a license fee to QnX they stood a better chance of taking off as a relatively small entity. So Linux really did enable Android.
Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without Linux Android wouldn't have gotten off the ground.
Cool, but not relevant to the point being made. Without Linux Facebook wouldn’t have got off the ground either. That doesn’t mean Facebook is a Linux service, their use of Linux (like Android) is entirely an implementation detail.
At their scale today it could have worked, but the question is if they would have gotten there in the first place.
All these companies making untold billions off the back of FOSS could at least be kind enough to acknowledge that fact, rather than to bury it.