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Will Linux phones stay around this time?

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Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#411

Post by username90 »

gspr wrote: post #301
yoz-y wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good UI design usually comes from one person knowing what they are doing and the programmers willing to follow. In OSS people are often motivated by full control.

Really? In many-person collaborative OSS projects, there seems to be a decent amount of belief that others can do better work than oneself.

You need to redesign your code architecture to fit the UI or you wont get a world class UI. That isn't what happens though, instead they hook in UI interactions so it looks like the designs but doesn't really work as well as you'd wish. I've never seen a developer who gladly did the architectural redesigns needed to make UI truly great.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#412

Post by criddell »

rolandog wrote: post #331
f6v wrote: post #127

Anyone who thinks Linux can gain a momentum on mobile should look at Samsung and Huawei efforts to get off Google. It seems almost impossible even if you already have a foothold in mobile industry.

I didn't know they were trying to de-Google. Would that have anything to do with user concerns about privacy?

If anything, it's because they want access to all the data Google collects. None of them care about user privacy.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#413

Post by sergeykish »

dagw wrote: post #215
jacquesm wrote: post #209

Earlier 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.

Windows Phone.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#415

Post by megous »

slver wrote: post #385
megous wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me GNU/Linux is the simpler more familiar ecosystem. Android is big and complicated, with different tooling, different APIs, different everything. On GNU/Linux phone I can write apps in regular electron if I like (not some cordova mess), I can access any Linux API and don't need to split my knowledge between mobile and desktop. I can write my phone apps with LAMP or node stack if I want and it would not be some li…

So you don’t just want Linux on the phone. You want basically the desktop Linux ecosystem on the phone. That’s a no go from the start. Even Apple didn’t do that when they made iOS. And the problem we solve with this is so you don’t have to learn something new. That’s honestly a poor problem to have.

Funny. :) I've learned much more using pinephone than I ever did using Androids or iPhones I had been lent for testing from a companies I did jobs for. Here's what I've learned for example: https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html

I just don't want to learn something that will be completely useless to me, because I'm not interested in commercial mobile apps development for Android, and that's about anything that learning android development will gain me, other than hobby points.

Learning general Linux programming and system design has cross-over effects into pretty much everything I do as a hobby or for my clients.

With pinephone (or any other GNU/Linux phone, for that matter), pretty much anything I wrote is portable to all other devices I have use for, incl. my desktop and I re-use code very often. Devices like e-book reader I've reverse engineered, which is not based on Android, or other weird little devices I have and like to mess around with that don't run Android.

I can learn some obscure Android API abstraction that works only on Android, or I can learn lower level Linux API (that it's using under the wraps anyway), that is fixed in stone, and usable everywhere Linux runs. I just choose what to learn based on what I can use more widely and will stay around longer.

If anything it's people who will not consider anything else but Android, and just handwavily reject anything else like many posters in the comments under this article, who seem resistant to learning something new.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#416

Post by birdyrooster »

herbst wrote: post #290
_0w8t wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern UI on the phones makes discovering features really hard. One often ends up with searching obscure forums just to know very useful feature like IPhone trick with holding the space bar to move cursor. I can understand that on 4” inch phones there were no space for extra buttons, but with 6” screens this became ridiculous. So much for “good” design.

Not sure if apple really can be considered modern in a space developing as fast as that. From my pov apples ui is still the dated sister everyone is trying to copy from

Apples UI has been copied since as long as I’ve been alive

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#417

Post by belval »

matthew_kuiash wrote: post #405
Forbo wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser checks of yore The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.

TBF 1/2 of them weren't even born...

Not sure why your comment is being downvoted, most of my friends think I am paranoid when I say we shouldn't only support chrome. To them it's the browser that always works whereas the others are a PITA to support.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#418

Post by username90 »

Forbo wrote: post #393
bregma wrote: post #292

I spent years working on the Ubuntu phone. It was a fully convergent device: by default it would present a phone UI, but plugin an a keyboard and screen and it presents a full desktop UI. The UI was designed by a team of brilliant professional designers and it was a technical success. Why isn't it around any more? (1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money…

> browser checks of yore The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.

IE6 was far behind the curve on features, Chrome is way ahead. The situation isn't comparable at all.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#419

Post by username90 »

belval wrote: post #417
matthew_kuiash wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF 1/2 of them weren't even born...

Not sure why your comment is being downvoted, most of my friends think I am paranoid when I say we shouldn't only support chrome. To them it's the browser that always works whereas the others are a PITA to support.

Which is why the current situation is stable and the IE6 situation got fixed. Nobody liked developing for IE6, it was a pain in the ass since it was so shit. But people are perfectly happy developing for chrome.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#420

Post by strictfp »

username90 wrote: post #418
Forbo wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser checks of yore The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.

IE6 was far behind the curve on features, Chrome is way ahead. The situation isn't comparable at all.

That's not the whole story. IE was innovative (albeit through embrace and extend) until they won and stagnated.
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